Monday 27 February 2017

Outbreak of common sense at the TPA!

Wonders never cease!

From City AM:

The TaxPayers' Alliance has suggested that business rates are a “bad tax” and could be replaced altogether.

The campaign group proposed several reforms to the current system including automating revaluations annually to avoid so-called “cliff edges” when business rates suddenly jump...

The TaxPayers' Alliance said it was time to review the entire system, and to consider replacing it completely with a land value tax.


Correct. If you strip out the bad bits from Business Rates, SDLT, Council Tax and so on, what you are left with is Land Value Tax.

12 comments:

Lola said...

Crikey!! I did say recently that there was a discernible headway building up behind LVT...

mombers said...

How about formally making it the landlord's burden by making them write the cheque? Will eliminate bad debt and much administration at the stroke of a pen. Also means it's easier then to get rid of the empty property exemption

benj said...

@Mombers

The point of getting the landlord to pay is that the market can readjust much more quickly and painlessly to rate changes. In the long term as we all know the incidence is the same, so makes no difference. But in the short term, it does. Hence all the anger over UBR at the moment.

DBC Reed said...

Did not believe this: thought it was an untypically crass MW spoof.Even when I got on to City AM site I was looking to see how MW had mocked this up.Whatever has happened to the Tax Avoiders Alliance?

Lola said...

DBCR. Tax avoidance, good. Tax evasion, bad. I understand that you worked in FE and therefore must have had a pension, on which you 'avoided' tax. (sort of). Do you have an ISA?

DBC Reed said...

@L
Leave out the in-fighting: something interesting is going on.
On the same day that the TaxPayers Alliance came out for LVT to replace Business Rates, the FT carried a story from Paul Johnson , director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, calling for the same thing, while, also the same day, the Adam Smith Institute published (on the Net) a "Budget 2017 wish list" which included : "Replace business rates and council tax with a land value tax that funds local government directly" WTF!!
It is beyond belief that this has not been co-ordinated.You don't think that Phillip Hammond is considering LVT for the Budget do you and has organised a media campaign among his Establishment cronies to soften up public opinion?

MikeW said...

Above,

Yes, interesting. Add this one to your list too. Even ends with a Churchill quote.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/28/britain-housing-crisis-land-ownership-white-paper

Lola said...

DBCR. I forgot to put the smiley in my post.

Yes. I've seen all that. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Hammond's cure for the 'problems' caused by the BR revaluations was solved by him saying ' OK from midnight tonight LVT on all landowners.

In yer dreams.

DBC Reed said...

@ Mike W
Toby Lloyd who speaks for Shelter is more one of us, a member of Labour Land Campaign, with which some on here have connections, but he is writing apropos the earlier Housing White paper and does n't mention Land Value Tax as such. (The joke was that it is the tax that dare not speak its name.)
But the organisations ASI IFS have given us endless grief over the years- and now they come out in favour of LVT with the sense of certitude that we would never dare adopt (as with Toby Lloyd who, in person, is as direct and rude as you could hope for).
Strange times. (It looks like Lloyd is an outlier away from the other three Establishment 'trusties' TPA, ASI,& IFS. He checks in a day late too.)

DBC Reed said...

I have misjudged the Institute of Fiscal Studies, blinded by Socialist and many other prejudices: it was making a case for LVT in 2012 , well-explained by Philip Inman in Guardian.
It must have been everybody else that was giving us grief

DBC Reed said...

@L
Have you read Philip Hammond's CV? Far from the City accountant image he cultivates, he started out as an Essex state-school chancer into fast cars and property deals with his company Castlemead which he still operates ,conflicts of interest be hanged.There is talk of poachers turned gamekeeper but this is going too far! I do not think I face an agonising choice between LVT and supporting national economic suicide by Brexit next Wednesday.

MikeW said...

DBC Reed,

Re Lloyd in Guardian,

Thanks for the heads up. I did notice he had left HG out of the list too. I assumed he felt that he should't scare the horses. Our Bookclub review makes his book a not-buy then ;)

Re 'I do not think I face an agonising choice between LVT and supporting national economic suicide by Brexit next Wednesday'.

Very funny.