Spotted by DBC Reed in Hansard, 2 July 1957.
Dismissing a nascent Home-Owner-Ist proposal to reduce Schedule A Taxation, Enoch Powell had this to say:
I am sorry to have to break it to him that the cost of this new Clause would be £25 million and, therefore, he will see at once that it is quite outside the ambit of any alteration to the Budget proposals which could well be made...
Of course, the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) is quite right in saying that if the proportion of owner-occupation increases, the consequential net loss would also increase. This was a matter which was considered with great care by the Royal Commission on the Taxation of Profits and Income, and both the majority and the minority came decisively to the conclusion, after hearing a great deal of evidence, that the beneficial occupation of a house which is assessed under Schedule A is a proper subject of taxation and that there would be unfairness between one taxpayer and another if that aspect of taxable capacity were ignored.
So, both for the reasons of principle, which are firmly set out in the Royal Commission's Report, and also because on financial grounds it would be quite impracticable to make a change of this magnitude, I must ask the Committee to reject the new Clause.
The comments by Cyril Bence (high sarcasm) and Douglas Houghton (who points out that it will merely push up house prices, create windfall gains for existing home owners, and thus defeat the stated object of "spreading [home] ownership as widely as possible") are also worth a read.
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2 hours ago
6 comments:
Nice piece of history. Interesting to see "property owning democracy" long before Thatcher and also a Liberal dissing land taxes with the defence coming from the tories and labour. When did schedule A finally go and who drove it through?
QP, the Homeys prepared the battle ground a bit better, rehearsed their propaganda and waited another six or seven years, at which stage they chucked out Schedule A entirely.
But they kept the relief for mortgage interest, obviously, which had previously been an allowable expense against the non-cash rental income. You've got to look after the building societies and land owners, eh?
But do we want to "spread homeownership as widely as possible"?
JH, not necessarily, but it would be nice if we could "spread the economic benefits of land ownership" as widely as possible via LVT and a Citizen's Dividend.
If that leads to higher levels of owner-occupation, which it probably would, then so be it, it's up to everybody to decide how to spend his own money.
This other quote from Powell on the politics of housing is good:
" It is the irony of our parliamentary democracy that we have stringent laws to prevent individual candidates from bribing the electors in their constituencies with so much as a shilling or a glass of beer but no no control at all over whole parties and parliaments bribing millions of the electorate
,to the electorate's own loss, for decades at a time.This is the cruelty of our system. Provided we in Parliament do harm to you the electorate,for long enough and on a sufficiently massive scale,we enjoy complete immunity from criticism or blame."
Hansard on the taxation of woodlands is very interesting too...it becomes clear that Schedule B was devised as a way of enabling big landowners to cultivate trees, which was seen as a good end in itself. It was only when grubby oiks like Cliff Richard and Terry Wogan started moving in on the action that the costs rapidly began to outweigh the benefits. Not that you can tell, really. There appear to be no official statistics on how Schedule B operated, applied to woodlands.
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