To think an annual property tax is incredibly unfair?

[Itchthescratch]

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.

There is hard data, the op put £39bn

Ongoing costs doesn’t mean much. If the gov provide a car and the person just has to pay for petrol and insurance it’s still subsidised by tax payers. The initial item is funded by the gov.

Yes, details of the Social and Affordable Homes Programme can easily found if anyone is interested in understanding government plans to fund social housing and other housing that it will subsidise over the next ten years. I don't know why posters are pretending that build costs are either irrelevant or there is no data available.

All your figures prove @poetryandwine is that SH tenants are paying virtually nothing towards the cost that the state has incurred in either building or buying the house that they live in. Presumably you think it's ok that this is just written off and as long as tenants are paying for the day to day running costs then that's grand. This is billions and billions of pounds that we are supposed to just forget about and pretend that SH isn't subsidised because tenants pay for maintenance etc. It's madness

There is, at least fundamentally, nothing equitous about taxation. Individuals having their efforts partially sequestered by a bigger entity is, at the fundamental level, theft. Where taxation has to be understood is where it can improve society through a collective responsibilty that funds investment to make society better for all of us. When it is correctly understood, the rich and poor can see the benefit of taxation and have no problem with it. I deal with this every day.

Where the concept of taxation starts to break down is mainly down to two things. The first is iniquities in the system. A good example of this is the Child Benefit charge where a couple with joint income above the charge threshold will not pay it, but a single income household above the threshold will notwithstanding the single income household has a lower overall income. This is an unfairness in the tax code which could easily be rectified. But it leaves a bitter taste to those affected. The second is fraud or negligence in the spending departments. We only need to think of the PPE scandals and have some awareness of Medpro and Baroness Mone, to understand our civil servants make terrible decisions. There are more examples. But essentially if we pay £100 of tax and know that £20 of that has been wasted in buying half a dozen pencils for the Home Office, then of course we should not be paying any more tax. We want the fat cut out first.

Any state sticking its shovels into the endeavours of individuals is prima facie wrong, until you introduce the concept of a collective responsibilty that is run ethically and efficiently. Then it all makes sense. We still have a long way to go. We need some very effective leadership with longevity to change things. We need some very clear and firm consequences for those who get it wrong.

I really do care about the waste in the system, more than I do about Andy Burnham putting my council tax up £250 a month.

There’s some good podcasts from the IFS on taxation (they were published last year and the series was ‘how to fix X tax’). Income tax and vat were not massively interesting but ‘wealth taxes’ and ‘property taxes’ were worth a listen -

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ifs-zooms-in-the-economy/id1511294104?i=1000734235354

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ifs-zooms-in-the-economy/id1511294104?i=1000733723551

as an aside - the unfairness you mention about child benefit is obviously rectifiable but is it ‘easy’? We don’t currently calculate income by household, all benefits and liabilities are individual. Obviously we could remedy that but I wouldn’t imagine it would be easy (unless I’ve missed something!)

If the government refuses, or is unable, to demonstrate that it is spending existing tax revenue efficiently, it's perfectly reasonable to question calls for higher taxes, particularly when those taxes risk forcing some people out of their homes before the inefficiencies in the system have been addressed.

DM's house was built in the 1930s. Not all SH houses are new. Some are fucking ancient.

They are, still, to use your word a "fucking" luxury. Time doesn't change who subsidised them,

Obviously we could remedy that but I wouldn’t imagine it would be easy (unless I’ve missed something!) @gotmyselfintoapickle

I have not thought about it too much, but there are more complicated areas of the tax system. We have also invented things from television to anti-viral medication, so fixing the Child Benefit threshold should not be difficult. There is a canton in Switzerland that levies its equivalent of council tax based on a deemed property value multiplied by household inomce; a coefficient. It should not be beyond us. Until it is fixed, people will be rightly angry at being wronged.

I dont see how it is subsidised when she has been paying rent for 40 years and will continue to pay rent until she dies.

Two completely different issues.

Exactly, the state still has the money is spent to build the house tied up in the house that your mother lives in. This means it can't build other houses for other people or use it for other things such as paying off our national debt and saving us astronomical interest payments.

I'm not saying SH isn't needed sometimes but it is definitely subsidised and there is an opportunity cost for the state even it's just that by housing your mum then someone else on the list doesn't get the house. There isn't enough money to build a SH property for everyone that wants one precisely because it's so heavily subsidised.

Ok, well anything is possible, but it all costs money to implement! (When you asserted the government could fix this easily I imagined you’d thought about it)

That’s great. I’m surrounded by houses built then, not sure what the issue is. If the gov cover half the initial cost it’s a subsidy from the taxpayer.

Because the rent is covering the running costs and not the costs of the house itself.

It's the equivalent of a friend building a house for hundreds of thousands of pounds and letting you live there for the rest of your life if you just pay the running costs. Would you really think your friend wasn't doing you a favour and wasn't subsidising you? You would be called a CF on this forum if you didn't acknowledge the huge benefit you were getting from this arrangement.

But if she had bought it, she would have paid less in mortgage than she has now in rent.
But it is still somehow "subsidised".
Why do people keep using "oh, but your SH is subsidised" as some sort of punch down?

That will almost always be the case with renting for long periods of time. Your point is?

My point is why do people keep going on about SH being subsidised.
We need more of it... it would save money in the long run, and give people housing security.

They are "going on about it " because other people are trying to say that it is not subsidised.

but isn't that already captured via income tax?

Because people like you seem unable to accept that social housing is subsidised when it is fact. For the individuals that are lucky enough to be able to access it this is a huge advantage. Shelter estimate that it saves the average SH tenant between £400-500k over a 50 year adult lifespan. The fact that there isn't enough of it to go around is relevant as is the fact that the state has to pump billions of pounds into building SH over the next ten years.

So we end up with a situation where the lucky people that can access SH are often adamant they aren't being subsidised, though factually they are, and those who can't access SH get penalised over and over again. They pay higher rents, have less secure tenancies and now will potentially have a new property tax passed on to them through rent increases that SH tenants will once again avoid. We are creating a weird two tier system where being a SH tenant is preferential to being a home owner or a private renter.

Yes and more of it comes from taxpayer funding.

"Give people housing security" That is exactly what people who have bought a home have tried to secure for themselves. But they have been branded "selfish", "hard-headed" and "inefficient" for not putting revenue generation first. For these "crimes", they should be forced out of their homes because of the government's right to generate more tax revenue from the location in which they currently live to give the "most vulnerable" more stability...

That’s not the point though, it is subsidised and also buying a house is risky with fluctuating mortgage rates, you have to pay for repairs and improvements.

People like me? I am not in SH. So please don't try and use it as an insult.
Where I live, you can not earn more than £30k to even get on the SH list. So people on not much more than NMW are spending over half their take home pay to line the pockets of private landlords, and as a result never be able to save up to buy their own place. So privileged, eh.

People like you I.e. people that insist despite all evidence that SH isn't subsidised. I wasn't referring to you being a SH tenant.

I don't even understand your second paragraph. Are you suggesting that I think private renters are privileged? I have argued the exact opposite.