<P> One of the key taxes introduced by Charles II was to help pay for the rebuilding of the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666 . Coal tax acts were passed in 1667 and in 1670 . The tax was eventually repealed in 1889 . </P> <P> In 1692, the Parliament of England introduced a national land tax . This tax was levied on rental values and applied both to rural and to urban land . No provision was made for re-assessing the 1692 valuations and consequently they remained in force well into the 18th century . </P> <P> When the United Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on May 1, 1707, the window tax, which had been introduced across England and Wales under the Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money in 1696, continued . It had been designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax . At that time, many people opposed income tax on principle because they believed that the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty . In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842, and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century . </P> <P> When the window tax was introduced, it consisted of two parts: a flat - rate house tax of 2 shillings per house (equivalent to £ 12.73 in 2016) and a variable tax for the number of windows above ten windows . Properties with between ten and twenty windows paid a total of four shillings (comparable to £ 25.47 in 2016), and those above twenty windows paid eight shillings (£ 50.94 as of 2016). </P>

When was income tax introduced in the uk