Latest mansion tax should be on top % homes locally not nationallu

Half a million home owners are currently in negative equity. That's 8%.

Even if we just look at people that have made a loss on their houses. Why on earth should they be taxed on this? It's madness! Where is the moral case?

There will not be millions of households in negative equity.

@Marshmallow4545 What is not true? Mortgage lending is generally much tighter now.

Yes, house prices have stagnated & dropped in parts, this doesn't mean negative equity for the majority. They will have put down a deposit and have paid repayments....

Selling your property for what you paid for it 4 years ago or less does not mean you are in negative equity...

Oh, then maybe it's helpful to know that if you're not sitting on a large taxable asset of some kind, then you don't need to worry.

There's little risk of being taxed on things you don't have. Even this lumbering government won't waste its time doing that.

Obviously I think we should focus on wealth taxes on the actual rich, eg people with assets of ten million or more. But those people have bought not just this government but the last and the next, so we'll never get that.

I don't think you quite grasp the situation this country is in.

It's so frustrating; our economy is fucked & a large component of that is our distorted housing market. I don't know if this proposal will help but we have to do something. Other countries have property taxes, CGT on main house etc but nobody wants anything to change here. If we have any hope of sorting our productivity we need to do something about housing.

I recently bought in SW London and family would fall into this proposal so I'm unaffected by any change.

That's not true in lots of regions including London. Lots of places peaked in 2022 and have dropped since then.

Op, I lived in a house that was in the top 5% locally price wise, I sold it recently for £525k - you can’t use local measures with housing because it’s so variable, some places are so much cheaper than others

"We all need to grow up a bit". And yet you throw around stupid statements about 5 cars and expensive holidays as if we are all sitting on piles of cash living the life of Riley

Or people that bought 4 years ago and will already be in negative equity having paid an awful lot of stamp duty up front? They also will be looking at much higher mortgage rates. No-one seems to care about them.

Very few people will be in negative equity if bought 4 yrs ago even if you add back in stamp duty. They may not have made any money which is a different thing.

Labour didn't care about kicking SEN kids out of their schools. They are hardly going to care about house owners.

I don't think you quite grasp the situation this country is in.

Keep your big house and your five cars and your holidays. Make sure those Northerners don't get any of it, or any of those other groups you resent. Keep it all. Sit on it. Build a big fence around it all and put a man with a gun to guard it.

You will have to, because if we don't fix inequality this country will turn into Mexico, or South Africa, or Brazil. That's what happens to countries with no meaningful middle class. We all need to grow up a bit. We are in serious trouble.

This.

My house was very expensive for my region when we bought it 5 years ago. It’s still only valued at what we paid for it. We used cash from a windfall to buy it. Our household income is less than £40K. We’re already paying 10% of our income in Council Tax.

There has been no ‘unearned wealth’.

I would much rather a property tax then paying another whack of stamp duty.

Or people that bought 4 years ago and will already be in negative equity having paid an awful lot of stamp duty up front? They also will be looking at much higher mortgage rates. No-one seems to care about them.

Shouldn't have bought such a valuable house knowing Labour are about to come in and shaft everyone.

People keep talking about houses that have massively increased in value. But what about people who have only bought recently and seen no increase but will still be subject to the mansion tax?

Honestly, she needs to put 2% on the basic rate and stop pretending you can make bricks without straw.

But you would have equity that a northerner doesn't. That's what RR will be sniffing around for. No matter what destruction it causes.

The tax won't be sensible or fair. We know this.

The difference between capital expenditure and replacement/maintenance is indeed very murky and this is why I believe it's too difficult to expect this to be evidenced potentially decades after the work has been carried out. For example, a new roof can indeed be a CAPEX item if performance is significantly improved. If you were getting a new roof fitted ten years ago have you documented the performance improvement this would bring to prove it was CAPEX?

It would absolutely only be fair to index link so called profits from housing. If you bought a house for £100k it should now be worth £191k if the price simply tracked inflation. The £91k isn't profit in real terms and shouldn't be treated as such.

Bringing in CGT would be tricky.

I’d assume, because that’s how CGT works, that you’d still get a deduction for capital improvements to your house (if you didn’t, people would be dissuaded from improving homes they might sell soon, which isn’t what we want - a bunch of shoddy first time homes no one wants to spend money on), but people who’ve owned their house a while may not have the records/receipts for this, because they never thought they’d need to show the cost of eg the extension they did in the 90s which makes up a decent chunk of the rise in value. Would the answer to that be “that’s unlucky, you’re paying tax on the whole gain” or would they introduce the tax with a specific starting point eg “the gain from when you bought the house or from 2015, whichever is later” because then people might be more likely to have the relevant records.

Trust rules allow for taxation every ten years. It may not be quite that complex for a house.