To think an annual property tax is incredibly unfair?

What’s that got to with it?

As a single childfree person will be worse off on lvt. Currently get 25% off and won't with lvt. Be paying heck of alot more than I do now. I pay approx. £1600 a yr for council tax with my discount.

Currently house value is approx £550k which means my lvt will be approx £2750 per year. Thats a jump of £1.1k more per year. How is that fair? Yet next door with 2 working people will still per person be better off and still individually contributing less but getting the same services.

How is a single person on a single income going to pull out an extra £100 pm. Thats a huge ask.

Perhaps the rural areas are more pleasant to live in

It still knocks your better services argument dead.

Why wouldn’t renters pay this charge? Do they currently pay council tax, a tax based roughly on the size of their property? Yes. This would be no different at all.

Your flaw is that you say the ability to pay = income. Your ability to pay isn’t just related to income, it’s related to assets too. You can sell those assets to pay tax. You may not want to do that but it’s unfair - and not at all progressive - to keep upping income taxes because people don’t want their assets to be taxed.

@ToffeeCrabApple If you have some poll tax type thing based on number of people, median earners with modest assets mr & mrs jones, pay more than mr filthy stinking rich who owns masses of assets.

If Mr Filthy Stinking Rich was also subject to a 1% wealth tax on assets over £10 million, it would absolutely be the fairest way to do it. A tax on wealth needs to be separated out from a tax on land/property otherwise one demographic is going to be disproportionately hit.

I'm childfree, why should I pay disproportionately more than a couple with 2 adults kids living at home? There will always be one group or other saying its unfair. 30 years on, the poll tax where every adult pays x amount seems to be the fairest way to do it. A land tax would see me paying the whole £1200 capped amount, which I don't object to, it's an extra £100 a month on top of £400 a month council tax. But I use very few services, have used very few services and am not likely to use many services going forward.

Emptying the bins might be more expensive but Londoners have access to far superior services. Is there anywhere in London with a bus service that runs twice a week?

Rural areas struggle due to lack of population density. Its much easier to provide services en masse to a dense population in a small area, than to a population spread over a wide area. E.g.

• carers having to drive 20 mins between service users

• dustbin routes spread over a huge area
• inefficient public transport that requires subsidies to run

Quite the opposite. My council tax is 33% higher than the highest London equivalent. I can assure you that services in rural East Anglia are considerably worse than those in London.

Whereas i (well off resident of an expensive house) would pay well over double.

Which is precisely the point. My pockets are deeper, so i pay more. Im ok with that.

0.48% of £700,000 would be £3360.

We current pay over £3500.

@LipglossAndLies I agree about funding of social care, and there are other things I think should be directly national funding, even if locally administered. Local discretion should be where things are locally funded.

So renters won't be paying towards local services or social care? That can't be right. There's a bloody rabbit off somewhere. I suppose landlords could increase the rent, but it would mean they'd all sell up eventually.

I'm not trusting any of this. Either way it won't benefit anyone.

The point if this is to tax wealth not people.

If you have some poll tax type thing based on number of people, median earners with modest assets mr & mrs jones, pay more than mr filthy stinking rich who owns masses of assets.

"But its not fair"

Define "fair"? Is it fair that capitalist economics rewards the city quant trader 20 times more in earnings per year than the intensive care nurse who works more hours?

Many of the wealthy people who earn a lot are able to do so in part because they get to live in a stable, low corruption economy with legal protections & low crime, good regulation to limit risk, a well educated healthy workforce..... all underpinned by public funding.

You can make more money in a country with well off customers to buy your products!!

Wealth redistribution might not seem "fair" but wealth accumulation certainly isn't either

Except that a rebanding doesn’t necessarily happen, even after a change of ownership and a huge extension being built!

Often ime those living in council properties or social housing often had more disposable income than those paying a mortgage so why can’t they contribute

I really don’t agree with this at all, Labour isn’t representing the working classes

I believe the proposed tax is around 0.5%, so you wouldn’t be taxed at a higher rate than them.

We have property taxes where we live, 0.5% for flats, 0.75% for houses and 1% for empty properties. It works well and is fairer and than Englands council tax.

Because we live in a society and that means its more effective to share resources in order to fund public services & support those more vulnerable who dont have the capacity i have to earn a fuck ton.

https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/andy-burnham-new-land-value-tax-how-would-it-work-b1286663.html

This article says it would only be paid by owners, not renters. So, people in rental properties would no longer be paying any tax to local councils or would the council tax remain and homeowners pay the land tax?

But is it a land tax or a property tax you’re talking about here, @Itchthescratch?

They’re very different. I’ve seen proposals for a land tax at 0.48% mooted. Nothing else. A land tax makes more sense to halt the hoarding of excess land by developers.

It’ll involve people (and the taxing authorities) understanding the size and value of the land their houses sit on. Flat leaseholders in London may end up not owing anything, for example.

It’s all to play for.

I think it's reasonably likely that property taxes change the value of properties.

I also think there's a frustrating transition problem. If income taxes were lower and property taxes were higher, such that on net there was no change, I think long-term this would be a good thing. (Taxes always somewhat disincentivise the thing you're taxing. Disincentivising living in a big house seems less bad than disincentivising earning money) However, during the transition phase, there will always be a bunch of people who really lose out. If you raise property taxes and lower income taxes, the newly retired have a really sucky time of it.

Of course, if the issue is raising property taxes AND not lowering other taxes - I think the government is awful at spending money, and should get better at spending money before it asks for more of it.

I never said they shouldn't!

I don't know the rationale behind exempting renters, but that's what I read somewhere recently.

Maybe it's a mechanism to reduce the number of landlords with hundreds of properties or something and free up more properties for sale. That means building lots more social and affordable housing of course to house those currently renting.