IT TOOK almost two hundred years from the introduction of income tax for Britain’s tax law to reach, in 1997, a monumental 4,555 pages. In just eight years, Gordon Brown has doubled that.

The latest edition of Tolley’s Yellow Tax Handbook, which contains the entirety of UK direct taxation legislation for 2005-06, was published this week at a colossal 9,050 pages, almost twice the size it was in 1997 when Labour took office.

The Conservatives said that the figures were a sign of the Byzantine complexity with which the tax code has become riddled under Mr Brown.

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, said: “The Chancellor’s constant meddling and increased complexity mean that UK business has to devote more and more time to tax compliance, time which would be better spent on customers and products. When will Gordon Brown wake up and notice that overseas competitors are simplifying their tax laws to encourage, not burden, business?”

A Treasury spokesman said: “Simply counting the pages of a handbook does not represent the Government’s tax reforms. In fact, the Government takes tackling complexity very seriously and has a good record on measures to simplify the tax system.”

The Government claims that it needs to add to tax legislation in order to clamp down on unfair and abusive tax avoidance.

However, John Whiting, chairman of tax policy for the Chartered Institute of Taxation, said: “There’s a heck of a lot more legislation and related material that fiscal anoraks like me have to get their head around sometimes.

“You can’t get away from the fact that the system is more complicated, which is why we have had a constant refrain of the need for simplification.”