Mansion Tax at £1.5m - what will this mean?

[MaureenOHara]

Does anyone have any idea what this might mean for an individual and what it might do to the market. What happened to the £2m market and will that be replicated or is it different?

You don't read beyond the headlines? Very unwise.

£11.9bn isn't a colossal amount in terms of government spending and is not much compared to £146.1 billion spent on state pension p.a. I don't begrudge either, personally.

More catastrophising. Do you have any evidence for this at all?

Pat McFadden is a guy, he’s a Labour MP. He said this about his party.

‘Every meeting I have is “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”. They’re asking the wrong questions.’

He’s right.

If you broaden your horizons, you'll find that there are thousands of properties 'Oop North' which would be affected

@NorthXNorthWest

"As for trying to present the State Pension in the same light as benefits paid to vulnerable people, with the implication that you shouldn’t really be entitled to it"

I haven't seen anyone do that. Perhaps I missed it. But it is undeniable that Pensions are a very large, and growing expense. More than we spend on Education, for example. Speaking as a recipient, I see no reason why our payments should perpetually rise even as the pursestrings are tightened fir the young.

And as we own most of the wealth, I see no reason why we should not expect to contribute more than younger people who have little or nothing. Our numerous ailments are a growing expense for healthcare. Somebody has to pay. Are you hoping the young will pay for us?

And they’re busy trying to piss of that tiny percentage of taxpayers so badly that even more of them retire early, cut their working hours or leave the country! Beyond idiotic.

And if you broadened your horizons you’d see that this policy is just the south subsidising the north. Again.

Are you relying just on the state pension though?

As to the headlines, it depends on the media.

Unwise to not look at the delta with the previous year, I would say. If you had, you would notice that YoY the Government paid £11.9bn in 2025 in universal credit to such claimants, up from £9.5bn in 2024 and £7.5bn in 2023.

Absolutely. Atax by square footage would be an actual mansion tax. A “mansion tax” that applies to some flats is Orwellian double-speak.

Labour is considering raising capital gains tax (CGT) to fund a £14bn handout for the lowest earners.

The Prime Minister and Chancellor are understood to be reviewing proposals to increase CGT to as high as 45pc to increase the income tax personal allowance.

The idea is laid out in a Budget submission from the Labour donor Dale Vince, warning that wealth is being “taxed more lightly than work”.

Equalising CGT with income tax would generate £14bn towards the giveaway, the submission claims.

Figures from the Government’s own tax office suggest increasing the higher rate of CGT by 10 percentage points would actually cost the Treasury £3.5bn a year by 2028-29 because of behavioural changes.

I did address this. My post explicitly explained how it would function and that the opt out from pension saving should be removed and mandatory contribution levels increased significantly. This could be funded without anybody paying any extra AS WELL as a huge investment in infrastructure and education simply by means testing state pension welfare at a level that wouldn’t put a single pensioner into anything even close to poverty. If you actually had read my post you would have read the above information clearly stated in it.

It won't be called a mansion tax. A pp said it would be something like a High Value Council Tax surcharge.

How does that work if you live in say Westminster with minimal Council Tax, or maybe the title is just that, a title with no relevance to Council Tax at all!

“Fully funded, fully costed”

‘The first budget will be a one off tax hike.’

And yet, Labour can’t work out what’s happening.

Yes. They've not even introduced the tax and the threshold has been reduced from £2 million to £1.5 million.

Not yet it hasn't. Wait and see.

The truth is that they don’t have any ideas. They didn’t come to government in the way that Labour did in 1997, brimming with big ideas and a sense of urgency. They’ve just sort of fallen into government this time.

It’s also nonsense to claim state pension is a contribution-based benefit. People accrue “NI contribution years” if they are unemployed or in receipt of universal credit (even if they have never worked), or if they don’t work and have a child under 12, or if they are a carer. On top of which, the contributions that many who DO work make are nothing close to the welfare they expect to receive in return. Not to mention that many female pensioners barely worked at all or worked extremely part time throughout the vast majority of their working lives. It is disingenuous in the extreme and factually wrong to claim that, as a cohort, pensioners have “paid” for the entitlements they have voted for themselves to receive.

Interestingly, amongst the current cohort of pensioners, on average they are extracting £200k per person more in state services and welfare over their lifetimes in real-terms than they have paid in tax over their lifetimes. Clearly that isn’t sustainable. Contrary to what you read in the media, UK workforce participation is at an all time high and working-age state benefits (including universal credit, housing support, disability benefits and all child benefits and childcare funding) is no higher than it has been on average over the last 5 decades as a percentage of GDP: the enormous rise in the welfare expense is entirely down to pensioner welfare paid at much higher rates and for much longer than previously. The current pensioners neither paid sufficient tax to cover their own withdrawals or to fund anything on this scale for their own parents and grandparents, yet for some reason seem to feel entitled to this without any means testing paid for by a generation with none of the economic and tax advantages that their own generation enjoyed then promptly voted to remove from the working age population as their own cohort neared retirement.

It’s not “Council Tax” if the money is appropriated by central Government and not used to fund local services.

I would like to propose a new tax myself.

All those who voted for Labour during the 2024 GE, should have to pay extra for every dumb fuckwit idea they have come up with since entering government.

Let’s hope this ‘one and done’ shitshow of a government, provides herd immunity for the electorate, from ever voting Labour again.

Ah, the old Labour kite-flying, you mean?

Beloved of Reeves - pre budget.

14 years preparing.

2 years wasted, fixing foundations? Etc.

And now bond-market/Blakey on the buses, Burnham.

And Starmer, and now Burnham want ten years?

WTAF.

It’s easy to see Labour going into the wilderness for a generation after this government and they have only themselves to blame. All that time in opposition and yet they’ve come to government with no ideas and no solutions.

Agree it’s a misleading name.

The point is that you don’t create growth in the North by taking yet more money from London and the South East which are already subsidising the rest of the country. People’s altruism and patience with this largesse and the greedy and vindictive demands that the same people pay ever more to subsidise others who aren’t remotely grateful for it is running out. If “Andy” wants to do devolution then he needs to ensure that local taxes are raised to fund the locally devolved services, otherwise it’s fundamentally undemocratic and not devolution at all. Spending rights and revenue raising responsibilities need to go hand in hand for whatever the devolved areas of policy are determined to be. You don’t get growth by extracting an ever higher percentage of income from those who are net contributors and disincentivising this positive behaviour, demonising and financially penalising people for it until it’s not worth bothering. You get growth by incentivising similar behaviour elsewhere, not by transferring income from one group of people to another. Labour just don’t seem to be able to grasp that the only way to improve things is to generate economic growth, otherwise you simply run out of people to confiscate more earnings from to fill your self-created deficit.