to think mansion tax is an unfair tax on London and the South East?

[goodnessgracious]

I disagree with mansion tax but regardless it seems to me to be unfair on Londoners.

Aibu to think that it may also force some people to sell their properties who are income poor but property rich?

YANBU.

£2 million will just about get you a 3 bedroom terraced house in N1. How is that a "mansion"?

A number of house owners are taxi drivers or similar who bought 20 years ago when the area was undesirable and are now retired. A huge amount are owned by the local authority and house low income families. This tax may well force the local authority to sell - splitting up families and leaving the area the preserve of the super rich.

[Disclaimer: I live in a flat and would not be effected by the tax, I just think it is wrong].

Err Greengrow that is what we pay in Devon for what should be a 20 min commute with the joy of wages a fraction of what London wages are to boot.

I think you will find London doesn't "hoover up" jobs, it provides them

Erm we do have cities with hoards of commuters outside of London.We also have perfectly good roads(when they bother to fix the pot holes,another bug bare) so no excuses for crappy,late,extortionate,hourly services.

No it takes jobs from elsewhere.

Other cities are perfectly capable of providing businesses with what they need if the gov bothered to put the infrastructure in but they don't.

hhhhmmm I'm torn on this, in theory i agree with the tax but personally i know of a few cases in which i feel this would be unfair.

My best friend growing up is Polish, her grandparents and great aunts/uncles settled in Chiswick (when it wasn't considered anywhere near as posh as now) as refugees from the second WW. Her grandmother and great aunts managed to get out but sadly the men ended up in camps/very horrible situations. After the war they came over and joined the women living together in large houses, they worked in low paid jobs and bought them.

Now there are a few left alive in their 90s and living in these houses which have lots of the original kitchen and furniture in, as they never could afford new stuff and made do (ie they haven't added any value to it, it is purely the market thru no effort of their own which has increased the price). But the houses which are their homes first and foremost, are valued probably at over £2m.

The inheritance tax would of course be paid on their death (which they are in full agreement), but they don't know how they could afford an extra tax on the house while alive, so would face the trauma of having to leave their homes. I do feel very sad for them in this circumstance and i know it makes them anxious.

Of course this is rare, but in the same way that my grandparents who were in their 4 bedroom council house and were not expected to downsize as it was their home, i think there will be a generation that this will affect unfairly. But i don't know what is the answer.

LOL at autocorrect.

It's spend per head, though.

And not everyone who lives in the north is rural - we have cities here too

Making it easier to move between cities is the key - there was a documentary a few months back that argued that rather than trying to decide which one should be England's second city and focusing money at that, we should imagine the whole corridor across the Pennines (or penises) as a northern mega-city and focus on building links across it. Compared with the investment in transport in the south east you (apparently) get a lot of return on your transport spend.

£10 a day is an expensive commute whether you are in Devon paying less on a mortgage and for full time childcare than you would in London or in London.

The tax may come in at £2m and go down to £500kproperties. That is exactly what has happened in the last few years with ATED which is a tax you pay each year, a capital tax, if your house is owned by a trust or company. It came in on £2m properties and soon will apply to £500k properties.

I sat next to a French lady at lunch yesterday who was complaining about French wealth taxes. In h er view the mansion tax will not bring in as much as anticipated so they will then apply it to people's savings, shares and other assets and second homes and the like (whcih if course for people like I am who have no savings and no other assets except a mortgaged London house is a lot fairer). Perhaps they should take 10% from everyone's savings in banks where the savings amount exceeds £10k per couple in this country instead.

"I should imagine a few go across the Pennines but tbh they would mainly go by car in any event as it is hard to live in a rural place without one."

Your ignorance is absolutely breathtaking. "A few"?! "Rural"?!

You should see the car park that is the m62 in a morning. Thousands upon thousands of people commute over the Pennines each day, between Leeds, Manchester, Bradford, Huddersfield, Halifax, Sheffield, Stockport. These are NOT rural places!

Mrsjoss - re the transport, a lot of that is the flip side of pushing out the middle classes, growing up in Manchester, if you had a job in Manchester City centre you'd not buy a house in Liverpool, but effectively the whole of the south east has become London commuter belt, we live outside the m25 and as we missed the pre-boom window to buy a house, DH commutes in every day. The sheer number of workers needed in London every day can't be served by London.

The trains between the cities in the north aren't designed for daily commuters being the bulk of their passengers, the trains between London and Brighton are.

I'm a sahm now, but it was interesting who in my old Central London office actually lived in London - the young child free paying stupid money in rent, or the older people who'd owned when it was affordable for middle class people to stay in London.

If you have a £1m house in London then move somewhere cheaper. In London. Job done.

Although how will they value a house? Council tax bands are massively out of date and property values are subjective so it is a nonsense.

They should have higher income taxes at the upper rates with more bands to better redistribute the burden. For example the "higher" rate kicking in at £32k is a nonsense. It needs to shift to the right to at least £50k then have two more bands at say £100k then £500k.

Property in a devon is high(thanks to the second home owners the Condems do nothing about) but wages low(my dh would get more than double for the same job) so sorry a £10 bus fare is just as expensive relatively speaking.

Exactly Iggly.

My inlaws are 30 mins out of London in a small but lovely 3 bed period property waaaay under the threshold.

Move.Loads of couples in Devon and Cornwall have to,away from communities they grew up in.

I agree Iggly

Same here LePetit

But lady, going back to house prices having "made" the people in that house £1m, that's only if they sell it! If they didn't, they can't access that money. This tax will be brought in before people have accessed the money.

It's a bit like saying to someone "right, your parents estate is currently valued at £1m and your the sole beneficiary, so we'd like you to pay the inheritance tax due on that now. You can't wait until you've inherited it and pay it out of the money you actually get, you have to just use your savings now. What do you mean you don't have it? You stand to inherit £1m, you are rich! You are far better off than those who's parents have nothing to leave them. What do you mean, you might not get the full £1m when they die if they have to use some of the money for care? That's tough, we are basing it off our predictions of their current estate value. No you won't get your money back if by the time you get it the estate is worth less."

We'd all agree it was unfair, so why is it fair to tax potential house sale values that a home owner hasn't yet got, rather than tax actual money made?

Londoners get waaaay more spent on each child's education than us in the SW Because many, many London schools have 85%-plus children with English as a second language, no English spoken at home, children whose families have fled terrible violence etc.

I agree with a Mansion Tax regardless, for the reasons most people have posted about. So yes, YABU.

Many Londoners do know what it is like to live somewhere else because they don't come from London.

I don't think this tax will affect the super rich who have the income to pay lawyers and accountants to arrange their affairs. It will affect people whose homes have risen in value because they bought a long time ago. You might as well raise income tax.

They tax based on properties for council tax - it is just an extension of that really.

I live on a street with £1m + houses (not in one myself - I live in a flat!). In the same town you can get cheaper houses, just the "wrong" side.

Given that people say that those on lower incomes who can't afford to buy should "just move", why not those with £1m houses?

But in reality it is a silly idea - it just wouldn't work. They'd have to sort out the council tax system as well IMO.

And other areas don't?

How about taxing property per square foot? That's a mansion tax.

AndyWarhol, thank you, you took the words out of my mouth. We moved to London because the commute was gruelling (yes, on that brilliant SE transport). Our tiny 3 bedroom flat has gone up in value by about 200k in very few years, in a not very fashionable area (and no, it's not worth 2mil). Even so, we have no chance of trading up without saddling ourselves with an even bigger mortgage than we've got now, because guess what, better areas have gone up by even more. We also pay more than £200 a month in council tax, so if our services are better then we certainly pay for them. We stay in London because it makes financial sense still, that doesn't mean we live the high life. I would love to live in Yorkshire if I could get a job that paid even half what we are earning here. To those who ask why we don't move - would you dare ask the same to all those people living in poverty on benefits because there are no jobs in their area? Apparently they've got the right not to be uprooted, but if you have the guts and drive to move somewhere where you can have a better life, this means you are fair game for abuse.

No merrymouse, I don't think higher income tax is fair. The really rich avoid it. The middle earners pay the most and many of them cannot afford to buy a house of their own at all. It is fairer to tax assets. The fact is, a lot of people have made a lot of money out of property in the last 20 years. Prices have increased way beyond most people's incomes. The average house price is now over 250k apparently. You would need to earn 70k a year to buy a house in that price bracket now.

I can see where you are coming from, OP. BUT something has to be changed. I assume people who can prove they are cash-poor will get some kind of discount like Council Tax Ben now. But I imagine there will be cries of 'fraud' and 'unfairness' there too, much as you get with, for example, absent dads not paying child support bec they've registered as self-employed, rich people with accounts off-shore, 'clever' accountants, etc. etcetera. Whatever system is used some people will cry 'unfair', but the status quo cannot continue.

I wonder how many elderly poor people really would be affected by this. Has anyone actually done a count of this?