The sprawling 17,000 page tax code looks unlikely to diminish with a change of government, hardly a vote winner after all. Attempts by the coalition to reform the cumbersome tax rules resulted in expansion of the rules, rather than any tangible simplifications. 

Despite the remit of the Office for Tax Simplification (OTS), set up by the chancellor George Osborne when the coalition came to power in 2010, with a five-year mandate, it was constantly stalled with limited resources. In a report published in the last days of the coalition, the OTS admitted that only a handful of broad-brush simplifications were achieved.