Summary of a conversation I had with a journalist today about Land Value Tax.

A journalist (who shall remain nameless as I do not disclose my sources:-) rang me this morning to chat about Land Value Tax, so we met at lunchtime to go through an implementation proposal I had drafted, I can't find the spreadsheet we were looking at, but apparently it's on the Labour Land Campaign website somewhere.

To summarise, including the stuff I didn't say, but wish I had...

1. I am a simplification campaigner as much as a pro-LVT campaigner. Even the worst taxes or subsidies can be made a bit less bad if they are at least simple and netted off as far as possible - there is no point subsidising something and taxing that same thing. Either pay a small net subsidy (and don't tax it at all) or tax it at a lower rate (and scrap the subsidy). At least that is the honest thing to do.

2. LVT is clearly the least bad kind of tax, compared to horrors like National Insurance or Value Added Tax. Endless articles have been written about why LVT is good and other taxes are bad, and either you understand them or you don't. I can explain stuff, but I can't make people understand stuff which they don't want to understand. (I can hear and I understand how sound waves and the inner ear works, but I can't give deaf people their hearing back).

3. The only real 'problem' with Land Value Tax is political. In the UK, we have a weird slavish worship of house prices. The last half century has shown, if house prices are rising, the party in government will be re-elected; if they are falling, the opposition party will win. So the politicians, of whatever party, don't like to utter the words "Land Value Tax" because - it is widely believed - this tax would push down house prices.

4. The UK already has a dozen fairly minor taxes (which between them only raise about one-tenth of total taxes) on housing, land values and private wealth generally. If we - in the interests of simplification if nothing else - replaced all these with a flat-rate LVT, there would be little impact on house prices and most households would pay the same total amount of tax over a lifetime as they do now. So this should be politically acceptable, assuming a rational electorate. (Business Rates just needs a few tweaks and it's LVT, that's a minor issue).

5. Annual revenues from the specific taxes in that spreadsheet (figures two or three years out of date) were as follows:

Council Tax - England - £24 bn
Council Tax - Scotland - £2 bn
Council Tax - Wales - £1 bn
Domestic Rates - N Ireland - £1 bn
Less Council Tax benefit, rebates etc - £(5 bn)
Stamp Duty Land Tax on housing - £8 bn
Capital Gains Tax - £6 bn
Inheritance Tax - £4 bn
TV licence - £4 bn
Stamp Duty on shares - £3 bn
Insurance Premium Tax - £3 bn

Let's call it £50 bn per annum, all in.

(Maybe we could scrap Housing Benefit for private landlords and exempt private landlords from income tax as a quid pro quo, in which case, the required revenues are only £45 bn. And scrap Help To Sell Buy, in which case, required revenues are only £44 bn and so on.)

6. The purists are quite correct to say that LVT should be based on site premiums i.e. the potential rental value of land and buildings, minus the cost/value of the actual physical building (referred to as the "Site-only rental value assuming optimum permitted use"). For a low level LVT, it is quite sufficient to base it on potential selling prices. So the purists say that £50 bn can be raised with a tax calculated as 25% of site premiums. The not-so-purists say that £50 bn can be raised with a tax calculated as 0.7% of potential selling prices. Comes to much the same thing.

Either way, there has to be some system of valuations, so I explained how we can adapt the Council Tax system very easily to get 80% - 90% of the way there. Is this the best way of doing it? For an expert valuer, clearly not. For administrative simplicity, I think yes, until somebody can think of something simpler and better, then I'll support that instead.

7. To summarise this summary: the UK already has LVT!! It is just diced and sliced and heavily disguised - the little people pay Council Tax and the TV licence fee every year; buyers/sellers pay Stamp Duty Land Tax; landlords and second home owners pay Capital Gains Tax when they sell; the really wealthy pay Inheritance Tax when they die; super wealthy foreigners pay the Annual Tax on Enveloped Dwellings etc. Each of these taxes is a minor tax, raises relatively little revenue and is fiddly and bad tax in itself, with all sorts of cliff-edges and unintended consequences.

If you replace them all with LVT, you have one slightly bigger and very simple tax (which would still raise less than half as much as VAT, for example) which is a good tax; most households would pay much the same over a lifetime; and the impact on house prices would be negligible (might push them up a bit, might push them down).

Healthcare Assistants

From The BBC:

There is no minimum standard of training for healthcare assistants before they can work unsupervised, an independent report has found.(1)

Some were doing tasks usually performed by doctors or nurses, such as taking blood.(2) The Cavendish Review was set up by the government to study the role of healthcare assistants (HCAs) in England after the Stafford Hospital scandal.

HCAs provide basic care in hospitals, care homes and at home. They should go through a universal training system and gain accreditation before they can work unsupervised, the report said.(3) Currently, there is no consistent qualification or training for HCAs, with employers deciding for themselves what training is needed.(4)...

There are more than 1.3 million frontline staff who are not registered nurses, according to the Cavendish Review. They provide some of the most personal and fundamental care such as turning people in bed so they do not get pressure sores, helping people to eat and wash and to get out of bed and get dressed. But the review says the quality of training and support that care workers receive in the NHS and social care system varies between organisations and, in some cases, is lacking.(4)

It calls for a new Certificate of Fundamental Care for fully-fledged HCAs - a qualification that would link HCA training to nurse training, making it easier for staff to progress up the career ladder should they wish to. All new recruits would need to obtain the certificate and existing HCAs would need to prove they had the equivalent training.(5) And in recognition of the important job HCAs do, they should be called Nursing Assistants.(6)

Journalist Camilla Cavendish, author of the review, said: "Patient safety in the NHS and social care depends on recognising the contribution of support workers, valuing and training them as part of a team. For people to get the best care, there must be less complexity and duplication and a greater focus on ensuring that support staff are treated with the seriousness they deserve - for some of them are the most caring of all."(7)

Peter Carter, of the Royal College of Nursing, was concerned that without mandatory regulation there would be a danger that any staff who were found to be unsuitable could move from one employer to another unchecked. "The priority must now be to underpin the recommendations made by Camilla Cavendish in the regulatory structure which governs care," he said.(8)

Christina McAnea, of Unison, said that in some hospitals HCA's have been treated as "cheap labour".(9) "Common training standards across health and social care are long overdue and welcome."(10)

1. They're assistants. The whole point of an assistant is that they are people working for someone else, rather than people with responsibilities. You tell them to do something, they do it. But if they screw up, you, the person in charge of them take it in the can.

2. Yes, because they're assistants to doctors and nurses. Who can show them to do something, and have to take responsibility for their work. And actually, taking blood isn't brain surgery.

3. Great, so instead of hiring someone with a reasonably active brain and getting them to work by a nurse or doctor showing them the ropes in some basic care, we're now going to have an accreditation scheme, driving up costs.

4. How much training does someone need in turning a patient or feeding them? Millions of parents seem to be able to manage this.

5. Right, so that means not only spending money training new recruits, but also certifying existing recruits. What's that going to cost?

6. Someone now has to go through every piece of documentation and change it. No more healthcare gets done, no more pay to nurses, just some more bureaucracy.

7. None of this means that these people will be more valued. If a doctor looks down on someone who turns the patients, they're still going to look down on the accredited people who turn the patients.

8. Well, yes. Once you get people with accreditation, they'll need a union to try to raise the salary of them.

9. Which is exactly what they are, and they only exist because we made nurses more expensive by turning it into a degree-level job, resulting in the workaround of creating HCAs. If we make the HCAs more expensive, we're going to have to create a new job like Nursing Dogsbody.

10. No, they aren't. Not for assistants doing feeding and turning patients. You want flexible people who can do what nurses and doctors tell them to.

"It sounds a bit like your house, but further away..."

Jasmine Gardner, in today's Evening Standard:

You'll walk in through a door on the high street, but you'll find almost nothing on the shelves. House of Fraser launched its second productless outlet this week, where aside from a few key items and some changing rooms to try on orders when they arrive for collection there will just be computers for browsing the website, using virtual personal shopping services and ordering online. It sounds a bit like your house but further away...

Crap analogy of the day

Courtesy of today's Evening Standard (two thirds of the way down the article):

Trudie Styler is berated in the press for accepting an invitation to guest-edit The Big Issue [a magazine run for the benefit of homeless people]. Her offence is to own six homes.... Why on earth should Styler be homeless to edit it? The presenters of Crimewatch are not required to be murderers. The sneering at the altruistic rich is hopelessly self-defeating.

Didn't the author mean; "The presenters of Crimewatch are not required to be victims of crime"?

"This is a news website article about a scientific paper"

Spotted by Roy D in The Guardian, who adds "More comedy when you follow the links at the end of the article."

Fluffed headline of the day

From The Metro:

"Peta slams Hilton's pig purchase"

*sigh*

If you're going to do alliteration, shouldn't that read "Peta pillories Paris' pig purchase"?

*/sigh*

Milking a story for all it's worth

Dear Journalists,

If all you do is rehash press-releases, can you try giving us the teaser headline first and then, after pausing for dramatic effect, giving us the 'facts', rather than the other way around?

Ta!
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From yesterday's Metro: Biggest breasts in UK to be found in Liverpool, accompanied by a picture of some, er, breasts. A short while later, the same newspaper/website followed that up with the headline: City with the 'biggest boobs' named, accompanied by a picture of Jennifer Ellison in a brassiere. Well, duh, we knew that already, didn't we, having read the previous headline.

"Lawyer: Politician behind journalist's death"

... is a cracking headline in The Metro.

It's a pity that there wasn't room for an estate agent in the story.