Item One. From the BBC's policy-by-policy summary (scroll down to 'Communities and Local Government'):
Freeze council tax in England for at least one year, and seek to freeze it for a further year.
Pure Home-Owner-Ism. Make life cheaper for people who already own houses but more expensive for everybody else.
Create directly elected mayors in 12 largest English cities.
Sounds good to me, provided people can vote on whether they want a Mayor in the first place.
Give councils powers to stop "garden grabbing".
Dude, WTF? There's no such thing as "garden grabbing". Nobody wakes up one morning to find half his garden has been fenced off and turned into a building site. Compulsory purchase orders are few and far between in this country. Councils already have the last word over every single brick that is every laid, anywhere. So to an outsider, it would be completely unclear what this means.
Give neighbourhoods more powers over planning.
"Neighbourhoods" is presumably the PC term for NIMBYs?
Abolish the Government Office for London and consider case for abolishing remaining government offices.
Excellent plan, get on with it.
Ensure courts have power to insist home repossession is always a last resort.
Pure Home-Owner-Ism. Subtext: if you don't own a house and got into debt because you bought a flash car and went on holidays, you are scum. If you own a house and remortgaged to buy a flash car and go on holidays, you are given Hallowed & Protected Status
Stop restructuring of councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon and stop plans to force regionalisation of fire service.
Sounds good to me.
Review effectiveness of raising stamp duty threshold for first-time buyers.
Meaningless. Do they mean "see whether it helps prop up prices" or "see whether more young people can afford to buy homes", one being pretty much the opposite of the other.
Item Two. Daniel Hannan's Daily Torygraph 'blog* Guess which taxes he says he would cut if he had £40 billion to spare?
Click and highlight to reveal: Council tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and stamp duty
* H/t UKIP Webmaster
Diminished
2 hours ago
7 comments:
I think you should post up your own list if you had 40 billion to cut taxes.
I'd cut
ER NI
VAT
Stamp Duty.
"Ensure courts have power to insist home repossession is always a last resort."
Whilst appreciating that none of this is ever going to happen, I would like to suggest that a fairer way to avoid turfing people out of their homes for debt would be to empower the local authorities to buy the home in such cases and rent it back to the debtor. This would have the added benefit of increasing the amount of council housing.
The main thing that causes repossession is the effect of recessions on bonus income. People working in trades with lots of overtime or sales commission run up debts against their earnings plus their bonus rather than just living on their salary and saving/spending the bonus.
So, up run the credit cards for holidays, loans are taken out for new kitchens and often, people even buy larger houses against this income.
When that bonus income dries up, they're left in the crap. They're nearly all like this. Repossessions of people who lived carefully barely exist.
bayard,
Get friendly with a senior member of staff in a Building Society, take them out for a beer and ask how easily courts grant repossession orders.
It's one of those political/media beliefs that suits both parties nicely. The media get their sob story and the politicians can present themselves as White Knights.
In reality, it's really difficult to repossess someone. You have to show that you've taken reasonable steps to keep someone in their home. People can turn up at court and because they've got children, convince a judge to grant a delay in the repossession.
It's so much trouble that they'd much rather not do it. Which is why you'll rarely see a media story with a genuine hardship case going through repossession. Even if they claim they were just living normally, all the signs are there that they weren't.
MW, I'm afriad I agree with all that, except the first bit
"Freeze council tax in England for at least one year, and seek to freeze it for a further year.
Pure Home-Owner-Ism. Make life cheaper for people who already own houses but more expensive for everybody else."
Renters pay council tax as well as mortgage payers.
AC1, I'd reduce VAT from 17.5% to 7.5% and busk it from there. Employer's NI comes next.
B, no chance! Why should the council squander good money on buying a house for £150,000 when it can build a new one for £50,000? By all means, let's build more council houses so that people who have fallen behind on the mortgage don't end up on the streets, but why not do this as cheaply as possible? And then some other family can buy the repo' for £125,000 or something. Win win.
JT, good anecdotal, thanks.
AC, see my subsequent post. Please make up your mind on what you think the impact of taxing land values rather than taxing incomes would be.
Are they going to do any BIG things ?
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