To think an annual property tax is incredibly unfair?

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I come from an area with low house prices. It is great! My friends can generally afford houses even with lower salaries as the earnings:house prices ratio is better. Rents are also lower so they have proportionately more disposable income.

I have moved to a more expensive area where house prices are higher and people have really had to push themselves to buy a property. Salaries are higher but not high enough to make up the difference. They have had to pay more stamp duty , pay more interest and have less disposable income each month.

I am really struggling to understand why my friends in the South should also automatically be paying more property tax under the new proposals being suggested by Burnham supporters? What is the justification? They would love to buy a large detached house for £300k like my friends from home but this isn't possible. It feels like they are being double penalised.

Just to add house prices haven't risen in real terms in the area in live in now for 20 years so the value of my friend's houses is simply money they have paid in.

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.

@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.

0.48% of £700,000 would be £3360.

We current pay over £3500.

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.

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.

Rural areas have notoriously expensive local services (39% more expensive on average compared to cities). Think of the sheer effort required to complete refuse collections.

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

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?

@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.

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.

But that's because there is efficiency in running bus services in densely populated areas with lots of people moving around a small geographical area. Rural bus routes are notoriously more expensive run as everything is far more dispersed. I don't know why you're debating it really. It's fact. Your lack services will be more expensive to run if you live rurally

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.

It still knocks your better services argument dead.

Perhaps the rural areas are more pleasant to live in

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.

What’s that got to with it?

Same here. I pay more council tax for my Band D than someone in the borough of Westminster. It's ridiculous. And our services really aren't that great. Also in East Anglia. The system urgently needs reform.

At 0.48% I would pay slightly more because of what my house is worth, but not much. But we don't know what the actual rate will end up being, or how this is going to be structured so it's all speculation.

It’s just a reframing of Council Tax. It’ll all be relative to your neighbours.

My Welsh band F house (worth £350k) costs me £3.5k in council tax currently. It would be less than half that at 0.48%. I wonder if some if the people worried about this are calculating it incorrectly? It’s your house price multiplied by 0.0048.

My bit of East Anglia isn't rural, it's a small market town. And it's shit. And unfortunately, the councillors who were actually starting to make a difference through hard work and engagement with the people got voted out and replaced with Reformaloons who only care about what's in it for them.

By the same token, how is it fair that I, in an economically shit part of Wales with a cheaper house than you, pay almost 2 grand more in council tax than you per year? The current system isn’t fair, and the new system would also shaft some people.

Council Tax and Stamp Duty will not be payable anymore, only the LVT. According to the article in the Standard above.

So you'll be better off by a mile!

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It’s not so crowded and nicer and the air is cleaner?

I suggested they were expensive, not necessarily better