to me worried that labours non Dom will crash the housing market

[medona]

Apparently even just announcing it has affected the prime London housing market. Its not just this area that is affected as it ripples down, so if they were to abolish it then it could start a housing crash for at least London if not the UK.

What is this "sentiment" business? You aren't making any sense at all, OP.

Research using figures supplied by HMRC & the Office for National Statistics has just been published. The areas with the highest average gross income in 2012-13 and with the highest average tax paid are Esher & Walton (59.6k 16.9k), Chesham & Amersham, Windsor, Beaconsfield, Mole Valley, South West Surrey, Runnymede & Weybridge, Hitchin & Harpenden, Sevenoaks & Tatton (43.8k 20.5k). These are all areas where British people live rather than non-doms.

Sorry £10.5k average amount of tax paid in Tatton, not £20.5k!

The only thing you've "lost" is the warm fuzzy feeling that your property is worth more than you paid for it.

That's not true. If you want to borrow against your house, it makes a big difference what a lender values your house at.

However, you are right rising property prices, even for owners, isn't always a great thing. We own in London, but would love to upgrade. A decline in prices would be great from our point of view.

I can afford to upgrade to a larger house, I would need an extra £150,000 on top any profit make on current house and new mortgage. The gap between each rung of the ladder is widening and really impossible for people to climb. I do hope we get a price reduction as its unsustainable down here particularly in the south east.

I can't afford to not I can afford to!

the forecast is for London property prices to fall a measly 3.6% this year, but rise by 2.7% by next year. Apparently house prices in London rose by 17% in 2014 too. Storm in a tea cup.

I'm not convinced the non-dom thing would make a huge difference. There are lots of reasons besides tax for wealthy individuals to want to live in the UK. Political stability and good security are two major motivations for those from Russia/the Middle East/some areas of Africa. Many find very welcoming and established expat communities. The English public school system is very prestigious and sought after. Communications and travel are good. A lot of non-doms would take a view and stay put because what are yhe alternatives? Tiny tax havens which don't have the same sort of lifestyle as living in London or the south east of England.

Nah. There's still not enough housing to go round. Why would there be a crash?

Let them go. I have seen a few of the K&C super rich in Westfield.

I remember one Lady in particular. I was in Next and the way she treated her slave employee was disgusting. I wanted to rescue her. I finished up and had a coffee opposite when telling my companions of the incident. Out they come. It was upsetting to see a small lady less than five foot being treated like a pack horse. When the employer was all shades and headscarf trotting along ahead empty handed top designed bag on her shoulder.

She can sell her house and piss off, we shouldn't be giving them tax breaks to the detriment of the disabled.

OP is there a link to the news article?

Am not sure of the details but if anything can be done to stop/slow down/make it more difficult for overseas investors to buy up lots of new build property in London, I am all for it.

Near where I live there is a block of 'luxury' apartments- all the owners appear to live in Hong Kong, hardly any of these landlords have seen these properties. Buying off plan before property has even been built.

First time buyers living and working in London don't stand a chance of buying anything!

medona, you're selectively focusing on one possible future tax policy. London house prices, esp for prime, are affected by many dozens of trends / policies, some of which are likely to be significantly more influential than non-dom status. These include:

• IHT status
• tax residency rules
• the continued absence of an LVT (cf virtually every other major developed city in the world)
• changes to SDLT
• the continued absence of foreign ownership restrictions / special taxes (unlike that commie stronghold, Singapore...)
• relative political stability and well-regarded court systems as lalaonglegs mentions)
• forex movements
• access to the City and to capital
• culture, education for kids, healthcare (public and private)
• English language and timezones
• wars, persecution, changes in taxation and other policies of foreign regimes (hello Ukraine, Greece, France, Russia, China etc etc)

etc etc

Some of these are inherent and not susceptible to change, others change slowly, others change more quickly. But they add up to a formidable constellation of factors that make non-dom status relatively unimportant in driving house pricing.

I would love to see something that demonstrated a causative link between the announcement of Labour's new non-dom policy and a fall in house prices. It would be a remarkable piece of analysis, given that house price movements, especially at the prime and super-prime end of the markets, are opaque and volatile (not least because of the small number of deals -- tens or hundreds, not tens of thousands).

OP, I don't really understand what you mean by 'sentiment'.

electra - I think the OP means confidence.

No. It's a non-problem.

I think it's right up there with: "AIBU to worry that if labour win the sky will fall down."

If you really are worrying about this sort of thing you have serious anxiety issues and should probably see your GP.

It really is not a problem.

I hope it does

let houses be homes not bloody investments.

By the way, I eWorld like to point out that, last election, the Daily Mail was basically saying, "AIBU to think that if Labour get in, money will disappear, we will have to barter, we will all be eating turnips, we'll be making electricity from potatoes and our children will be slaves."

This was possibly an over-exaggerated scenario.

And I suspect this one is too.

Am I being thick or are people actually talking about two different things?

First off, as I understand it, non-doms are UK nationals who live here but for tax purposes say they live elsewhere and thus pay no UK tax. They will buy up properties and live in them, use the facilities of this country etc but make no contribution to it. Afaik SamCam's dad was one.

Secondly, there are non-UK nationals who buy up empty properties, let them sit empty for a couple of years and then sell them again in order to cash in on the housing crisis. They aren't non-doms though because they aren't resident here. So I don't see how going after the non-doms would affect this.

Have I got it wrong? I don't see how there can be an overlap between the two groups.

I do think though, fwiw, that both groups are cunts.

Oh and Eastpoint, interesting figures but I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) because of tax loopholes etc there are people who get far more than that who wouldn't show up on HMRC figures precisely because they avoid/evade tax. So it isn't a true picture of which part of the country is more wealthy, because the very wealthy people don't really pay tax - that's for middle income earners and below.

That was my point - the areas where you have the super rich/non-doms are not featuring as they don't pay tax. What level do you call middle income, under £1m per annum or under £50k?

You can be British and inherit non-dom status (or claim it if you have dual nationality) but most non-doms are not British. Yes, overseas residents buying property are not non-doms although it is true that many of the super-rich non-doms also invest in property and don't necessarily live in their homes full time. Someone in (I think) Vanity Fair described prime property as a type of security box, a handy way to store your money anonymously....

Sorry Eastpoint, I was being thick. I thought you were saying that people in Esher were richer than people in Kensington. Sorry!

lalalonglegs, thanks for the explanation. I thought it was down to the number of nights you stayed in the country that allowed you to avoid UK tax and that British people could do it (dimly remembered from my time working abroad).

Cruikshank - yes you can avoid paying UK tax if you are mainly resident overseas - but I checked up and that seems to be a totally different thing to non-Doms (I was worried as its possible we could end up doing that for a few year, and to somewhere with worse tax than UK).

No one is talking about shutting that one - unlike the US who reserves the right to tax its citizens on income wherever earned or they are resident. (I do think in some ways the UK still believes Income Tax is a temporary tax.)

Eastpoint, that logic doesn't work. I work with a lot of non doms and they all live in the Esher/Weybridge area.

Non doms do pay UK tax - but only on what they earn in the UK. Most of them earn good salaries here as they like being resident in the UK so do pay towards living in this country. It's just their offshore earnings that are protected.

I agree though it's an archaic law and doesn't belong in the modern day tax system. We are totally out of sync with the rest of the world and it should be scrapped.