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With the tax system taking almost £4 for every £10 earned in the economy, getting tax design wrong can be hugely costly. Yet the level and quality of debate on tax policy is inadequate; there has rarely been any clear sense of direction from governments; and expensive and damaging mistakes have been all too common.

In many areas of public policy, governments have habitually set out long-term strategies for change - in education and transport, for example. But no recent government has set out a tax strategy. The consequences of lacking a coherent vision for the tax system have repeatedly been illustrated, not least in the previous Labour government's experience of a succession of ill-thought-through reforms that were introduced and later abolished - including CGT taper relief, the 0% rate of corporation tax and the 10% starting rate of income tax - at great political as well as economic cost. And there have been equally indefensible - albeit more politically successful - sins of omission, such as the spineless failure of successive governments to update council tax valuations in England and Scotland that are still based on 1991 property values.

With this in mind, the IFS launched a fundamental review of tax policy under the chairmanship of Nobel laureate Sir James Mirrlees, to identify what makes a good tax system for an open and developed economy in the 21st century and to suggest how the UK tax system could be reformed to move in that direction.

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