Killer arguments against LVT, not (110)

Seriously, I don't enjoy doing these posts any more than you enjoy reading them, but people keep coming out with drivel which is factually not true:

The so-called ‘mansion tax’ on properties over £1m would be impossible to enforce and will never come to fruition, says a property lawyer.

John Stephenson, senior partner at Bircham Dyson Bell, says the overriding unanswered question at the moment is whether the tax will be on the property or the owner.

He says: “If it taxes the property, then it’s just another version of the council tax and will be fraught with problems of how to value the property, how often to value it and by whom - the local authority?"

Sure, on a political level he is quite right, it will not come in as long as senior politicians own very nice houses themselves and are in the pocket of people who live in even nicer houses paid for from the profit they made tricking the little people into overpaying for OK houses - and if he'd said that, then fair enough.

But we have a tax in the UK called 'council tax' (which is nigh impossible to evade - 98% collection rate) and another one called 'Business Rates' (which is payable regardless of the status of the owner - onshore, offshore, pension fund, Crown Estates, makes no difference - which requires regular revaluations and also has 98% collection rates) which show us how to do this.

And don't give me this 'sneaky offshore owner tax planning' nonsense. The previous government implemented a Tory proposal called the 'non-dom levy' (whereby wealthy foreigners who live in the UK hand over £30,000 per person per year to preserve the value of certain tax breaks and to be otherwise left in peace) and unsurprisingly, most of them pay up. As you can imagine, I don't really like this tax (some of them have moved abroad again, so it's not clear whether the measure was revenue-positive overall), but it would surely be far easier to collect it by slapping a tax on a few posh houses in central London and Poole, Dorset.

How difficult can it be to do some sort of rough and ready valuations, send whoever is registered as owner at HM Land Registry a tax bill every year, and if they get into arrears, to first notify the residents (in case they are tenants or something, in which case the tax can be deducted from the rent payments - a bit like the deduction of income tax under the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme) and if the tax remains unpaid, to then auction off the title and keep the net proceeds on deposit for when the previously registered owner shows up?

I'll give you a clue: not very difficult.