It's small potatoes but FINALLY some good news from the Liberal part of the Government

[LaurieFairyCake]

I can't even imagine how bastardy the Tories would be without the Lib-dems whining in their ear (I want them to whine more) but the Liberals have persuaded them of two useful policies:

1. Council tax to be paid on empty homes
2. No discount for council tax for second homes

Now there are hundreds more policies that would be helpful, lots of which are on the frothing thread but just wanted to highlight two that I didn't even know of til yesterday.

What makes you think the Conservatives wouldn't have supported these measures? Raising tax is an imperative at the moment and something like empty homes is a fairly soft target.

What makes you think the Conservatives wouldn't have supported these measures?

Erm because their general attitude is if someone else can foot the bill they should and these measures are targeted at the sort of people who are not living in poverty?

The Tories don't have to offer any policy concessions to the libdems AFAIK, so must therefore be in agreement.

I think it dovetails nicely with the recent announcement of 2500 new tax specialists to target tax evasion, avoidance and loophole exploitation amongst the wealthy; 100 of them to target those 350,000 people in the UK who earn more than £2.5million.

sadly not bastardy enough

Oooh, disputandem, 100 people to target 350,000 people. So that'll go far.

Against (off the top of my head, IIRC) 5,000 Inland Revenue job losses.

HMRC has been haemorrhaging staff for years - 12000 (or 14% of the workforce) between April 2009 and April 2010. A full quarter since the merger between Inland Revenue and HMC&E in 2005. I'll do a search but I don't remember you handwringing about it then B&B.

A team of 2500 to target top rate tax avoidance seems like a step in the right direction, that's all I'm saying.

Bread. I guess whether or not you think 100 people is enough depends on your opinion as to whether every rich person evades paying tax or only a small minority.

Both ideas make a huge amount of sense but probably doesn't go far enough.

Anything that removes the idiotic bias this country has for artificially propping up house prices is a good idea since it will reduce the cost of living and make us more competitive.

Better would be people having to pay double council tax for empty/second homes. Definately we need for stop BTL investors being allowed to offset mortgage costs against rental. I can't speculate and borrow money to buy shares and offset it against dividends, so why is it ok for houses?

Get rid of SMI. How could Labour justify using taxpayers money to overpay on mortgages for idiots who speculated on property? They paid you 6.08% on any mortage in arrears even if your actual mortage was a tracker at 0.5%! The ConDems reduced it to 3.83% but I don't see any need for it at all. At least the ConDems have tried to reduce the prop generated by hugely overinflated housing benefit payments.

In terms of tax avoidance/evasion I don't see why anyone thinks the ConDems are softer than Labour. In their first finance bill they closed the loophole that EBTs exploited. Labour did nothing for thirteen years and EBTs have to be one of the most common tax avoidance measures.