Robin Williamson

Robin Williamson MBE, CTA (Fellow), MA (Oxon) – winner of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award in the Tolley Taxation Awards.

Robin Williamson, who sadly died in September 2022, was a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. He originally trained and qualified as a solicitor, before specialising in tax. He began working as a technical author for CCH shortly after it started up in the UK. From 1989 Robin worked closely with the late Philip Hardman and others in developing CCH’s Tax Statutes and Statutory Instruments (the annual Red and Green tax legislation books), Hardman’s Tax Rates and Tables and other publications.

In the early 2000s Robin helped set up the charity Tax Help for Older People, leading the development of the urban pilot in the West Midlands. In 2003 he was appointed Technical Director of the CIOT’s Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG) (www.litrg.org.uk), a post he filled until 2018, directing the Group’s work on all aspects of personal tax that affect individuals on low or modest incomes, including tax credits and how tax and welfare systems interact. During those years Robin engaged in consultations with HMRC and other Government agencies, lectured to tax and welfare rights audiences, appeared in the press and broadcast media and gave evidence to Parliamentary committees. In June 2015 he was awarded an MBE for voluntary services to taxpayers.

After stepping down from LITRG Robin spent a year as a senior policy adviser at the Office of Simplification, working mainly on that Office’s report on the taxation of life events. He continued to write in tax and other periodicals and to contribute to professional publications.