AIBU to think a £2m homeowner should pay mansion tax?

[LadyJos]

Anyone read the Telegraph Article about the 93 year-old man paying mansion tax on his £2m Richmond Home he bought for £15,000? AIBU but isn't £15,000 to £2m a fairly good return over 60 years, and shouldn't he pay some tax at the end? I can't help thinking since the home is mortgage-free, he has options here to pay the £2500 a year...
‘I’m a 91-year-old veteran about to be dragged into mansion tax. This is wrong’
www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/house-prices/91-year-old-about-dragged-into-mansion-tax/

Keep their home for themself? What gives you or anyone else a right to someone else's money?

What about people in expensive social housing? They are costing the state an enormous amount of money by occupying homes worth so much and tying up public money in this way There are 110 council homes worth over £2 million. Surely these people should be forced to move and sell. In fact surely everyone in social homes over an even lower threshold should be forced to sell following the same logic

How can they sell if they dont own the property? Or am I misunderstanding what what social housing is?

shes in her 80s but lives independently due to the fact her 2 children, 4 sets of grandchildren and also x2 great grandchildren (late teens) all live

So again, she has options - and if her family don't want her to have to move they can help her out between them?

We will have to pay mansion tax at the top tier - which will apparently be £7.5k in 2028, rising annually? Well, it is what it is. At least we missed VAT on school fees as our youngest was leaving school.

What I would say though, is around us (SW and West London) a £2m house is far from a mansion - it's just a tiny Victorian terrace or an ordinary semi. I don't think elderly people should have to pay this tax and it's ridiculous to say they can 'just move house.' Do people realise how much stamp duty is?

How is the value of your house even calculated and by who?

We paid about 300k in stamp duty 8 years ago.

Quite a lot of people are making arrangements to go overseas. We're not planning to - yet. I don't mind saying more tax if it actually makes a difference. Problem is, I'm not sure it will because it just gets squandered in bureaucracy.

This thread isn’t about paying for his care? If he has savings or assets over £23k he will do that anyway. So he obviously will. This is about an additional mansion tax?

Yes, GOD FORBID people should want to keep what they have earned themselves. If he has benefitted from inflation it hardly makes him a “greedy bastard”.
And as for “wanting to keep it all for themselves”? I suggest you look around you, at the things YOU have. How much of it do you actually need? Really and truly, probably not much. And I GUARANTEE you have more than some people. Does that also make you a “greedy bastard”?
Your post merely confirms that it IS envy.

Elderly people who happen to live in London should definitely NOT get pressured into equity release schemes. These are a con. I know of a few pensioners who have virtually lost everything through compound interest. These schemes should be illegal.

Basically, in practical terms, this 'mansion tax' is a tax on London. / SE. As I said, it is what it is. But elderly people should not be driven out of their homes and there are many millions of pensioners and families who are asset rich, cash poor, relatively speaking. And no, they can't all just pick up and move north.

When* I was a student I rented an attic in a house in Streatham, owned by a *dentist & his wife. They had two small dcs and two lodgers, to make ends meet. Recently I looked up that house and it is worth just over 2 million. It isn't a mansion, it's a semi with an attic.
Perhaps mansion tax could be avoided by the owners letting a room or two to help the housing crisis. That would make more sense, and help everyone.

You mean a mansion like this one?

I found this property on the Rightmove Android app and wanted you to see it: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/88559943

Exactly @RoundedRobin . And that's in Richmond which is Zone 4. A 4 bed period house in that kind of condition in Zone 1 would be £5m.

I was being sarcastic.
They could bring in an engagement ring tax I pay annually - its value has risen, but I’m using it in the same way I always have.

The top 20% of earners can be living in state subsidised social housing and that's fine according to you despite it having an obvious cost to the state and the often desperate individuals stuck on a never ending waiting list. Some might be nurses but it's just as likely that they are high paid professionals in other non vital fields.

Someone who owns a £2 million house and doesn't claim anything from the state should be subjected to extra tax for no particular reason other than the fact that people like you don't like others owning expensive assets.

This is such weird, twisted logic and the epitomy of a culture of state dependency.

Why isn't is greedy to insist that you have a claim over other people's stuff? That is the epitome of greed. You have no idea what what they have done for what they have or the sacrifices they have made. It's just crazy BS. These aren't billionaires or Elon Musk. Everyone should be very wary of the inevitable creeping scope that will ensue. How greedy of anyone to want to keep anything for themselves. Let's take a share of everything.

Ummm, I am in total agreement with you? I think you may have misread my post?

Sorry I was agreeing with you. I didn't mean it to read as the opposite

Okay fair.

It’s the “redistribution of wealth” that pisses me off. Such a benign phrase but in practice? Not so much.
And yes, everyone should be wary of the “creep”. We ALL have things we don’t necessarily 100% NEED. No one actually needs even one pair of shoes……We all have more than someone. Those who are shouting now might well find that the things they have are taxed next…..

They should be paying rent. People in social housing who are in work pay rent and it's not cheap/subsidised. It's just more controlled/not run for excessive profits. In some areas social housing is pretty much the same as the private market. In other areas it's lower purely because the market has gone a bit crazy. It's not subsidised as such, the problem is that the availability of social housing is so reduced now that people in need can't get it so they get stuck in shitty private accomodation with the high rents subsidised by the council via housing benefit. In places where there is a shortage of social housing should we change the system so that it's only for those in the most need and once people who needed it originally are doing better they have to move out? Maybe. I definitely think there should be measures to stop someone living in a council house but investing in and renting out another property for example.

But I was more addressing the straw man argument of (fictional) high earning people in 2 million pounds council homes they don't need to pay mansion tax on. Still, it makes a change from all the people in social housing being workshy layabouts on benefits.

Re tax in general and handouts
If you live to need medical intervention or social care that needs to be paid for. Some people will pay more than others and it's inevitable that some people will "lose out" if they pay in but don't need medical treatment. However, unless we pay care workers high salaries you need people doing those jobs and they will be paying less tax overall than someone earning 100,000. So, is it fair to then let those care workers go without help themselves because they haven't paid in as much? Because then noone will do those jobs. Or does everyone accept that some pay more in than others but the NHS etc is there for those who need it.

It was exceedingly rare in the past to live to the age of 90. This pensioner and his wife have both loved full, healthy lives. It's not a coincidence this happened in a developed country in this time period. They have benefitted from society as well.

Social Housing rent is subsidised. A quick Google will tell you how it is subsidised. This argument has been had a million times on MN.

Why would it matter if you're a high earner in terms of whether people on SH should pay Mansion tax? The government doesn't care if owner occupiers are high paid or on minimum wage. They don't care if you only have a small amount of equity and the bank de facto owns more of the house than you do. They don't care if you have no pension or other assets and are actually poorer than lots of other people with mixed assets. You must pay up. Meanwhile some SH tenants get subsidised to live in £2 million houses for their entire life and we just turn a blind eye. We have people living on SH on very expensive parts of London and whenever anyone suggests that they are moved then we get arguments about people needing security, to be close to their networks and how terrible it is to be turfed out of your home. Funny how none of these things are considered important on this thread for some people.

They don't though.
Find me one example of someone living in a 2 million council house. I actually looked myself because I though maybe the Barbican but even there the fanciest privately owned homes aren't sold for as much
The people living.in 2 million council.houses but earning loads is a completely made up hypothetical originally used to make a theoretical point about fairness. Somehow it's morphed in your head into a real thing you are angry about. It's not real. Surely if you have to find grievance in imaginary scroungers, the situation isn't that bad?

Social Housing rent is subsidised

It isn’t. I’m sick to death of trying to explain to people who wilfully refuse to understand the difference between subsidy and not for profit.

Have you ever googled it? I am asking genuinely as you always appear on threads about this and you seem incapable of understanding how the state provides grants and cheap capital to build SH. All you seem to care about is that the rent covers ongoing costs and then you pretend that this means it's not subsidised. It's like me borrowing a friend's car and paying for petrol and running costs but ignoring the fact they bought the car in the first place.

Imagine feeling entitled to something you own. The audacity.

*Exact figures on the value of social houses is not available, but across England there were more than 110 social homes, current or former, sold for more than £2m since 2021, which could therefore attract the mansion tax, a Telegraph analysis of property sales data and EPC ratings found.

EPC certificates, which give properties an energy rating score, highlight the tenure status of each property.

Some of these properties are likely to have been traded into private hands since the EPC certificate was carried out, but the analysis highlights that a sizeable number of social housing would cross the £2m threshold.

The constituency of the City of London and Westminster had the most, with 23 properties identified, followed by Hampstead and Highgate with 15.

All but two of the social homes that were expensive enough to attract the charge are in London, with the remainder in Surrey and Buckinghamshire, according to the Land Registry*

An extract from the Telegraph that I found easily. Not everyone's favourite paper but I think it's hard to claim that every single one of these SH properties and all other properties of this kind have been sold off. There are still £2 million SH in circulation.