I'm with BabychamSocialist, TabascoToastie and Lillian Gish on this.
The situation with foreign investment into the British property market should have never be allowed to get as bad as it has. We now have streets of vacant homes and blocks of nearly empty apartment buildings in many major British cities bought as investment opportunities by wealthy foreign nationals or multinational corporations. Up until 2010, many of the corporate owners of these homes didn't even pay council tax due to a loop hole in the law, regardless of whether the property was vacant or inhabited by corporate employees. Indeed, the law has only just recently changed so that foreign owners and investors have to pay British capital gains tax if they sell a British property.
Yep, they weren't even paying CGT when they were flipping flats.
I can't believe people aren't more incensed by the fact that people who actually live in this country can't afford to buy property here because foreign non-dom millionaires are pricing them out of the market.
Neither can I, Lillian. What has happened in London is beyond a joke. Land and property is a limited resource, and needs to be productive. What we have are "void" households in prime properties in the heart of a national economy where inhabitants paying no VAT or income tax in Britain. It's worse than parasitic, as it then pushes up costs for British nationals and residents who have to live further and further from their places of work.
But I do have to say one thing ... all this crap started under Blair's Labour government. I remember back in 2001, there were concerns about the repercussive effect of shed loads of foreign capital pouring into London prime real estate and how it was pushing the British rich out into previously middle class areas, and how that was then pushing the middle classes out into previously working class areas .... and on and on until we get to the point in 2017 where a two bed flat above a chicken shop on Peckham High Street now costs £300K.
And all that money paid by the poor sods trying to service very high mortgages or paying stupid rents on overpriced properties is money that cannot be spent elsewhere in the economy. It's money that can't be spent on a new kitchen, a new sofa, meals out, a dishwasher, or new clothes, which then has a knock-on effect in terms of wider employment and VAT take.
Shrinking the scope of economic demand for goods and services in this way is really dangerous for an economy. There a fair amount of evidence to suggest that it was the dangerously small pool of demand for goods and services in the US that actually created the circumstances for the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash. Because once the wealthy lost their cash in the Crash, there was no-one else that could afford to buy the goods and services to keep the economy afloat.