It is no secret that Rachel Reeves is strapped for cash.

Against a backdrop of rising inflation and weak growth, the Chancellor is staring down a black hole that some predict could be as high as £50bn.

Worse still, some efforts to save money have already been killed off by Labour backbenchers, while bond market vigilantes have driven up Britain’s borrowing costs to their highest level since the 1990s.

That is without even taking into account the impact of Reeves’s Budget tax raid last year, which has crushed business confidence and dampened investment.

All of which means that the Chancellor is now scrambling for reforms that will boost the economy at minimal cost.

Here are some of her options.

The top rate of income tax is supposed to be 45pc, but for those earning between £100,000 and just over £125,000, it is in effect 60pc.

That is because workers in this bracket lose the tax-free allowance, which applies to the first £12,570 of pay for workers on lower incomes.

As a result, it can appear rather unattractive to earn more if most of this extra income will be taken by the taxman.

“Where we have these kinks in the income tax schedule, those will tend to act as a disincentive to people to work more – I might not want to take that promotion, or I might want to go four days a week,” says Isaac Delestre, at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

Scrapping this baffling tax quirk would help ease the pain.

Losing child benefit can see families’ effective tax rate rise to almost 60pc. This applies when one parent in a three-child household earns between £60,000 and £80,000.

Believe it or not, that is an improvement on the old situation. Before Conservative reforms, a family with three children faced a tax rate of more than 70pc.

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor at the time, called the system “confusing and unfair”.

Following changes introduced by the Tories, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) calculated reforms would encourage parents to work more hours, amounting to the equivalent of an extra 10,000 full-time jobs.

However, perhaps the most egregious tax trap applies to adults with young children.

The Government has ramped up subsidies for childcare in recent years to try to get more parents back to work.

Yet for a cohort of highly productive workers, the way the system operates can be an enormous disincentive to seek out a promotion or put in extra hours.

That is because the support schemes are withdrawn entirely once one parent’s taxable income rises above £100,000.

It means an extra penny of earnings can cost a family with two young children £14,500 in disposable income, according to the IFS.

The think tank estimates that their disposable income – after tax and childcare – will not recover to its previous level until the parent earns £134,500.

These parents have an enormous incentive to cut their taxable income, whether by pouring money into their pension to reduce their taxable income or by cutting the number of days they work each week.

Turning the cliff edge into a smooth slope might cost the Treasury money, but would no doubt ease families’ worries.

Companies face similar cliff edges.

Small businesses have to register for VAT when their turnover hits £90,000.

That creates a huge incentive to stay below that threshold. Businesses and sole traders often stop earning once they edge closer to the limit as they seek to avoid the threat of introducing a 20pc tax on sales.

Whether that means working only four days a week or closing for a month to keep takings down, it undermines growth in their business and the wider economy.

The Conservatives cited this “bunching” as a reason to raise the threshold from £85,000, but that just shifted the problem instead of abolishing it.

Slashing the threshold would be a blow to small businesses and their customers, but might encourage more growth in the long term by removing it as a barrier altogether.

That was the argument of the Resolution Foundation when it was run by Torsten Bell, now a Treasury minister.

The think tank previously called the high threshold “a tax on growth”, claiming that: “The best outcome would be lowering it to the point where almost no business owner would consider the option of deliberately staying below that level of turnover.”

Cutting it to £30,000 could raise £1.5bn for Reeves.

To say that reform of property tax is overdue is an understatement.

The IFS has described council tax, which is still based on valuations from 1991, as “out of date, regressive and distortionary”.

The think tank has also branded stamp duty one of Britain’s most hated taxes because it penalises people for moving.

Back in 1988, a typical homeowner moved house every nine years, according to property website Zoopla. In the first six months of 2022, the gap was 21 years.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has previously urged the UK to move away from “transaction taxes which constrain housing and labour mobility”.

Instead of a property sales tax, the Fund suggested adopting a new annual levy based on land or property values – a system some argue this would be fairer.

After all, the average London house price is now more than seven times what it was in 1991, compared with a four-fold increase in the North East, according to the Office for National Statistics.

At the same time, the distribution of central government funding to local authorities is still based on property values in 1991.

This effectively means councils in Newcastle must now levy more tax on a property worth £250,000 than in Kensington and Chelsea to deliver essentially the same on valuations.

However, as the think tank points out, any major revaluation would produce winners and losers.

Back in 2020, the IFS suggested that a simple revaluation that reflected relative increases in property values would hit homeowners primarily in London and the South East.

Back then, it said residents in Hackney and Wandsworth could see increases in their bills of up to 45pc, while people living in Fylde near Blackpool could see a 15pc reduction.

A more radical reform that linked bills proportionally to a property’s value could see bills in Stoke-on-Trent slashed in half. But it would also see bills quadruple in Kensington and almost double in parts of Surrey.

There was a reason that Margaret Thatcher backed away from a poll tax.

It is not just moving house that matters. Building them would boost the economy too.

That is why bats and newts are high up on Reeves’s hit list.

The Chancellor has repeatedly grumbled about the many obstacles to getting things built in Britain, telling the House of Lords economic affairs committee last month that she cares “more about getting a young family on the housing ladder than I do about protecting some snails”.

She has a point. In a now infamous example, the chairman of the HS2 rail line admitted it was spending £100m on a shield to protect bats in ancient woodland in Buckinghamshire.

Sir John Thompson said this was just one example of 8,276 “consents” required from public bodies, and expressed frustration at red tape across the UK.

Reeves also knows there is a big prize on offer if she manages to reduce bureaucracy.

The OBR said Labour’s planning reforms were already expected to drive an increase in housebuilding of 170,000 homes until the end of the decade, which would in turn increase Britain’s medium-term growth prospects by 0.2pc.

Reeves has since ordered officials in the Treasury to go further.

Prepare for more red tape to be slashed.

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