Tax avoidance
Tax avoidance schemes had been commonly used for years by celebrities in the entertainment world to protect their income and had been used for some years in the US to finance films. Tucker, whose interest at least initially was as much as a patron of the arts as devising tax schemes, and Boyd were among the first in the UK to provide them to finance films. The film critic and historian Alexander Walker commented that financing films in such ways became a common practice at the time but suggested that ultimately it was self-defeating because the government of the day might well have concluded that if the British film industry was so good at inventing financial self-help of this sort then it had no need of government assistance. Indeed, the "1985 Films Act", pushed through parliament by Norman Lamont, a fellow alumnus of Boyd's at Loretto School, despite all-party protest, dismantled all subsidies to the British film industry. Boyd severed his link with Tucker in 1984.