HM Revenue & Customs Table 16.1 (2009)

HMRC publish a table showing the price declared for Stamp Duty Land Tax on private residential property purchases/sales in the UK, which we can manipulate (using the mid-figures of the ranges) to show the distribution of property values (at 2009 prices).

In other words, the median purchase price was just under £150,000 (as we'd expect, a bit less than the mathematical average given by the Nationwide for Q4 2009 of £162,116). The 80th percentile is about £220,000 and the 90th percentile is about £320,000:


In other words, putting pensioner households to one side for a moment*, if we replaced the entire tax system (apart from fuel, tobacco & alcohol duties etc) on a fiscally neutral basis with a flat tax of 7% on total residential property values (or 14% on site-only values, or about 70% on site only rental values) and trebled Business Rates (VAT and corporation tax would be scrapped of course - when I say 'entire tax system', I mean 'entire tax system'), it is nonsense to claim that people wouldn't be able to afford it.

Those figures relate to privately owned residential property (so we can conveniently ignore the one fifth of households who live in social housing, army barracks, prisons etc), the net tax bill (once you net off their Citizen's Income**) payable by a median household would be about £2,500; the net tax bill payable by an 80th percentile household would be about £7,000 and the net tax bill payable by a 90th percentile household would be about £14,000.

For sure, this doesn't deal with the highest earning ten per cent of the population/the most expensive ten per cent of homes, but if we scrap income tax and so on, they'll be able to look after themselves (or not, as the case may be), I'm not too worried about them, they are not going to starve or anything.

* I have a cunning plan to sort out The Poor Widow Bogey once and for all, which will be revealed later.

** Assume an average working age household includes 1.5 adults @ £70 per week and 0.75 children or young adults @ £30 or £50 per week = £8,000-odd per annum, which for convenience we can net off with that household's Land Value Tax bill.