Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey has granted HMRC new powers to raid couples’ joint bank accounts to claim unpaid taxes, meaning tax authorities will be able to take money directly from a joint account to pay for one partner’s tax debts, with no guarantee that a minimum amount will be left in the account. But some tax experts have argued that this could leave vulnerable women in financially coercive or abusive situations more at risk.

Mother-of-two Nicola Jaques MBE, 40, was impacted by her ex-husband’s secret gambling addiction, which saw bets being placed using their joint account. She now works for Beacon Counselling Trust (BCT), a gambling and mental health charity that supports people and families affected by gambling harm.

I know what it’s like to discover devastating debts, addiction and secrets within a marriage. I met my now ex-husband at college when I was 17 – he was serving in the military at the time. We married when I was 24 and, as he was the higher earner, I trusted his decision to open a joint bank account for us. I had no financial literacy but it didn’t strike me as unusual. My parents, who had been in a long-established marriage, had always adopted joint finances and it had worked for them.

In the early days of marriage, there weren’t any red flags of financial abuse or coercion. Things were always paid when they needed to be. As for signs of gambling, he would have poker nights with friends at home but all the girlfriends and wives would be in the kitchen chatting, so there seemed to be nothing to worry about. If I ever asked him about investments or savings, he would always say: “You don’t need to worry about that.”

What I didn’t realise was that over years, I was being groomed to hand over all my financial responsibilities. I had never even heard of financial abuse before.

In 2017, seven years into our marriage, everything came crashing down. It turns out my ex had been secretly gambling, starting with online betting and moving into sports, and it had escalated to the point we couldn’t pay priority bills or the mortgage. One day, I received a text message that a payment was being deposited to a payday loan company via our joint account. The truth came out.

When I tried to log into my online banking, I discovered my details had been changed. Eventually, I found that he had been using our joint account – our household income – to fund transaction after transaction of bets. More than 30 per cent of our monthly income was being spent on bets. Our youngest had just turned three, and our firstborn had just started school. It was a living nightmare. By that time, his addictive gambling had already created a devastating impact on our family.

When I went to the bank to ask for protections to be put in place for the children, the bank manager accused me of being complicit in the gambling. Point-blank, they refused to sever the joint account, saying the only thing I could do was to remove myself from it, but it wasn’t possible when that’s where my income flowed into. I had a separate account, but it turns out he had access to that too.

He racked up tens of thousands in personal fraud, credit cards were taken out in my name; a car lease; a loan whilst I was on maternity leave, again directly through the joint account using all my personal data. Overall, all the debts amounted to well over £100,000. We eventually lost our home and our relationship broke down.

I do believe that these new HMRC powers will create significant risks for many women and families in vulnerable positions, particularly those at risk of financial abuse and control. These rules wrongly assume that the money in the account is being deposited and drained in a 50/50 split by each account holder. But the reality is, this is rarely the case. Like me, victims of financial control may not have independent access to documentation, logins, or even the ability to communicate safely with authorities without the abuser finding out, and they can be left with nothing to feed their family, or cover living essentials.

It’s bizarre to me that gambling harm is something that is supposedly now being tackled by the Government as a public health issue – in terms of commissioning, support, and treatment – yet these new HMRC policies are totally at odds with that. This type of legislation sets a precedent of making one person’s debt – potentially as a result of a recognised mental health disorder – an instant burden to people around them. It is almost saying: “Rather than identifying signs of gambling harm, we’ll instead collect it and extend those harms to people that love you.” It’s not an intervention.

As for HMRC saying it will only act when they “hold the necessary information”, and that it “will notify the non-debtor prior to any deduction and provide an opportunity to object”, my husband was burning the post for five years. With gambling, people get more manipulative. People get more secretive. They hide it. That’s why it’s known as the hidden addiction. Their family will be the ones to suffer.

I’ve worked with people who are too scared to open their own credit reports because they don’t know what they’re going to find, and then they are also trapped in those relationships for significantly longer because they don’t have the financial means to get out. It feels like HMRC are constantly looking for quick wins, but this kind of legislation harms the partners and children behind the gamblers as they take on the liability of those debts.

For a long time, fully combined finances were the default social expectation upon marriage – it was the traditional thing to do. I think joint accounts are a risk now. Financial autonomy and personal financial security is more essential in today’s world than ever before. We need financial literacy, we need financial education programmes, or assessments for individuals before they enter into these financial agreements with their partners. 

I despair that they can give HMRC these powers around debts and finances, and yet we do not even have a new gambling act. I’ve been in and out of Westminster for the last two-and-a-half years now campaigning exactly on this and looking at the family impact of gambling harms. 

The fact that HMRC may be able to instruct banks to make regular deductions, with the maximum debt for £5,000 is horrendous. Who’s the cost to? Vulnerable families. There are people like me entering into relationships solely on trust, love and care. Long-term, there can be frightening ramifications for us.

“Domestic abusers use any means necessary to exploit victim-survivors, from making them pay their wages into a joint bank account they cannot access through to refusing to consent to closing joint bank accounts even after they are separated,” Sara D’Arcy, head of external affairs at Surviving Economic Abuse, tells The i Paper. “Abusers already misuse HMRC as a tool for economic abuse, including by making false tax fraud allegations or coercing survivors into tax debt. 

“By giving HMRC the power to reach into joint bank accounts to recover an abuser’s debts, the Chancellor is exposing survivors to another avenue for exploitation. The state should not make survivors pay the price for an abuser’s tax debts. 

“Any new powers must be designed with survivors’ safety in mind from the outset. HMRC must work with victim-survivors and specialist organisations to ensure these powers do not create new opportunities for perpetrators. We stand ready and willing to work with HMRC to design protections for survivors and design out economic abuse within our tax system.” 

My divorce took years, and the emotional, mental, and physical trauma of that episode of my life is something I’m still healing from today. I lost everything, but my only failing was trusting my husband.