Cancer Treatment

From the BBC

A fundraising appeal is being launched in Wiltshire to help hundreds of radiotherapy patients receive treatment closer to home.
The Great Western Hospital (GWH) in Swindon needs £2.9m to equip its own radiotherapy cancer treatment centre.
Around 700 people had to undertake a 60-mile round trip to Oxford for treatment in 2013/14 - some doing it several times a week - the NHS said.

I'm curious about the ongoing costs of this. OK, you raise £2.9m for equipment with I guess, a five year lifespan. But now you've got a load of duplication of staff like receptionists, administrators and maintenance people. You no longer have a single centre of excellence - the expertise gets split.

Economic myths: Victorian railways were private enterprise

Sobers repeats the Faux Lib myth:

The State did indeed build the M4, but the growth of Swindon was driven entirely by the building of the railway works by Brunel, which was private enterprise, not the work of the State at all.

Victorian railway companies were indeed privately funded, but without the intervention of the government on behalf of society as a whole ('the State'), they would never have happened; all those railway companies depended very much on the government.

Why?

Because to build a railway from A to B you need to be able to buy up lots of strips of land from hundreds of different landowners; without an Act of Parliament giving you compulsory purchase orders (or whatever they were called in those days), the railways could never have been built.

And why would you want to build a railway from A to B? Because there are people and businesses at A and people and businesses at B; by shortening the effective distance between the two, extra value is created and the railways taps into that added value.

So without 'the State', being the sum total of the people and businesses at A and B and the government to ride roughshod over the rural landowners in between holding out for their ransom payments, the railways would never have been built; and although private individuals stumped up cash up front to build the railways, they got their money back from 'the State' in the end (in ticket prices etc).

PS, all the railways ended up going bankrupt and being nationalised anyway, even though this was not entirely their own fault.

A Cafe Owner Writes...

Spotted from a local cafe to me

Our landlord allowed us the first six months rent-free but the minute we started to trade we, like all similar businesses, became liable for a terrible trinity of taxes - VAT, National Insurance and local business rates. Only now, far too late to save us, has the government allowed a £1000 reduction on rates and £2000 (maximum) on NI. We've been waiting months for an additional revaluation of the business rates, which has finally come through, just as we're having to close, so we'll never benefit from it.

If we'd managed to make any money, we would have had to pay corporation tax on that, of course.

We don't object to paying our fair share of tax but what we owe - and cannot pay - the taxman is far outweighed by the value of the state benefits that will be paid to our redundant staff. That looks like madness to us.

I'll never understand businesses complaining about having to pay the tax bill. It's the one thing that you absolutely 100% know up front and should factor into your calculations. If you didn't like how it worked out, why did you go into business?

We did everything and more that the government encourages businesses to do - renovated and brought back to life a property that had been empty for years, employed otherwise unemployed people, paid minimum or living wages unlike many employers, took on apprentices, invested in training and operated ethically.

If you go into business to do what politicians thinks you should do then you shouldn't even be going into business in the first place. I run my business based on 4 things: what the law is, what I don't lose sleep about, what I like doing and what makes me money. That's difficult enough. Doing what grandstanding politicians would like me to do would destroy it.

At the same time, every day we read in the news examples of tax avoidance by excessively wealthy individuals or multinationals, the taxman's sweetheart deals with particular businesses, the scandal of zero-hours contracts, banking malpractice, massive and undeserved bonuses, overcharging by energy companies...it never seems to stop. We are not all in this together. It really is one rule for them and another for us. And by us we mean all small businesses, including our rivals.

I did wonder about these people when they first started this cafe. Couple of ex-council officers, I wondered if they were maybe Guardian reader types. Sounds like I was maybe right.

It's funny how their rivals are all in business still, and have been for years. I think one of them must be coming up on 20 years in business.

The simple fact is that to start any business, you need experience of that business. And that's doubly so for cafes and restaurants. Even if I knew that business, I'm not sure I'd want to go into it. I know there are two things that make it work. One is having a good product. The other is having a good location. And the second is generally the most important. OK, if you're Raymond Blanc, you can buy a place out in the country and have a successful restaurant and people will travel miles to you (and even then, his location is in the wealthy bit of Oxfordshire). If you're a cafe doing lunches, location really matters.

This cafe is on the edge of the Old Town shopping area in Swindon. It's further than almost all the shops from the main parking area, meaning that people are rarely going to be at their last shop and go on to it. If they want a coffee, they'll go on their way back. Even if it was well run (and I'm not sure it was), it wasn't like to succeed.

"Swindon bans fish over allergy fears"

From the BBC:

Swindon Borough Council has banned fish because a local man has a potentially fatal allergy.

Schools in the area have asked pupils not to bring in fish or fish based products with their packed lunches, supermarkets have been asked to remove all fish based products from their stores and destroy them and all fish and chip shops have been shut down as an emergency measure.

It is hoped that this will protect the man who suffers a severe anaphylactic reaction to any contact with fish. Some residents feel they have not been consulted and the whole area should not be affected "for one person".

But Swindon mayor, Cllr Theresa Page: "This is a life-threatening issue, anything less and we wouldn't need to be as drastic."

Work has commenced on a new channel divert the fish laden River Ray further south away from the town and the council will also be scanning aerial photographs to identify ponds potentially contained fish and contacting property owners with removal requests.

"Cow destroyed after posing a danger to public"

Emailed in by Steve A, who adds "You’ve been neglecting your bovine stories recently. So here’s a case of mistaken identity that ends in death."

[Mea culpa, I got a bit carried away with sink holes.]

From The Swindon Advertiser:

A COW has been destroyed after escaping from a farm between Calne and Lyneham this morning.

Wiltshire Police were called to an incident shortly before 9am after a member of the public reported that a bull was on the loose on the main road. Members of the public were warned not to approach the animal while officers attended the scene.

It later transpired that the bull was in fact a cow…

Listed Buildings

From the BBC

A yellow-roofed warehouse in Swindon that featured in a James Bond film has been given Grade II*-listed status.

The Spectrum building, Renault's former distribution centre, was designed by Lord Norman Foster and opened in 1982.

Featuring yellow steel "umbrella masts", the futuristic single-storey glass-walled building was also used as a backdrop in A View To A Kill in 1984.

Roger Bowdler, from English Heritage, said it was "one of the very finest examples of a hi-tech building".

Famous for his steel and glass designs, Lord Foster created the Gherkin and Millennium Bridge in London, rebuilt Berlin's Reichstag and also Hong Kong Airport.

...

The building saw the last of the car manufacturer's workers move out when Renault closed its operations there in 2001.

Since then, the 25,000 sq m building has housed a car seat manufacturer, a soft indoor play centre and a firm that produces DVDs.

... and a car dealership. Since 2001. Get the message?

One of the things about buildings is that they're often very hard to repurpose. Look at the Olympics - we're burning £100m+ on converting it from an athletics stadium to a football stadium. Sometimes, you can take a building and make it work for something else (like the EMI CD production building in Swindon that is now a car dealership), but it's often quite difficult. Which is why you need people to be able to either take large chunks out of them, or just knock them down and build something new in their place.

And one of the problems with buildings that could be classified as "modern wank" is that they're not only self-indulgent by the people creating and commissioning them, they're also not very practical. Even the early users often find them a bit crap, but repurposing them and maintaining them is even worse because of irregular use of materials and shapes. Once you list them, this is only going to get worse.

So, give it a decade, this will be probably be like so many listed buildings - empty, with the owners praying for a fire to destroy it so they can put something useful in its place.

Local Homey News

From This is Wiltshire

Lorraine Williams, a spokeswoman for the Lydiard Fields Action Group, said it was really important to have the park in a rural setting to allow users to get a sense they are leaving the city behind.
She said: “For many individuals living in the area this development would make a huge difference. When you go to the park it gives you a sense of being in the country.
“I couldn’t always afford to take my children off to the country for a weekend. It (going to the park) gave me a chance to feel like I was having a little bit of countryside.”

Now, I happen to know Lydiard Park very well, and I used to cycle down Hook St and out to Hook, Purton and Minety, and this is total balls. Here's a map to help you:-

Marked on there is Lydiard Park. It's built next to housing. You can walk through from Grange Park (where the Lydiard Fields Action Group are based) to it on a footpath. Takes about 5 minutes. If you look through the trees at one end of the park, you can see houses.

Beyond Lydiard Park for about 10 miles going West or North there is basically nothing but fields and a few villages and hamlets.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (180)

The previous thread has got a bit messy, so I'll start again.

Sobers, who is a master at Home-Owner-Ist DoubleSpeak has come up with more superficially clever but factually incorrect and totally contradictory arguments against LVT, none of which stack up in fact or in logic, and even if they did wouldn't actually be arguments against, but are on the one-dimensional level which appeal to tabloid newspaper readers, they are roughly as follows:

1. LVT will clobber a lot of businesses, i.e. those that use a lot of land (primarily farming, large scale manufacturing), which is A Bad Thing, he singled out Honda in Swindon as an example.

This is simply not true, it's what you might call "an outright lie".

a) A known amount of income tax, corporation tax, PAYE is collected from farming. There is a known amount of farmland, some of which has a low rental value (forests, about £10 an acre) up to tip-top land suitable for growing vegetables (up to £300 according to a farmer I know). We happen to have very good records of this because CAP payments are (or were) paid out at different rates according to the value of the land (so the owner of a forest got much less in subsidies than the owner of tip-top farmland).

So we can deduct the total value of the subsidies from the total tax they pay averaged over the past few years (it's possible that this is a negative figure) and divide this by the total rental value of UK farmland to arrive at a percentage and hey presto, that's your starting figure. As long as LVT on farmland in year one is equal to or less than this, it can't possibly have a negative impact on farming. As it happens, that net tax minus subsidy figure is very low (might even be negative) and the total value of UK farmland is a tiny percentage of the rental value of privately owned urban land, so as far as I am concerned, we could just exempt farmland for the time being and just make farmers pay normal LVT on their housing.

b) I also reminded Sobers that the LVT on Honda's Swindon site would work out at an average of £225 per car (assuming full production of 200,000 cars a year), which is a tiny fraction of what they are paying now in VAT per car. And half of their site appears to be a car park i.e. storage space for finished cars not yet sold, I'm sure they could cut back on this if they were so minded.

c) We can go through business after business after business, and all we establish is that some will pay a bit less tax than now, some will pay a lot less than now, and some will pay barely anything compared to now. The fact that shifting to LVT will benefit some businesses more than others is a minor concern, it all levels out in the end.

d) Just to remind you (i.e. Shiney) of the basic calculation, there are about 2.1 million acres of privately owned residential land and 0.3 million acres of privately owned commercial land (a mere four per cent of the UK by surface area). If we want to replace all taxes apart from duties on fuel, booze, fags and gambling) we'd need to raise £300 billion a year. Now, to head off the Poor Widow In A Mansion nonsense, let's assume that pensioners' sole and main residences are exempt, so reduces the amount of taxable residential land down to 1.7 million (pensioners are one-fifth of the population, 2.1 million acres minus one fifth = 1.7 million).

£300 billion divided by [1.7 million + 0.3 million = 2.0 million acres] divided by 4,840 sq yds/acre = an average of £31 per sq yd per year. That's the average don't forget, and distributions being what they are, two-thirds of land would pay less than this and the median would be about £25 per sq yard, which happens to be Swindon.

e) Reality check: LVT on residential land would raise about £250 billion, about ten times as much as Council Tax currently does £25 billion. So the LVT on an average/median home would be about £10,000 - £12,000 per year. The cost of the core functions of the state is a laughable £60 billion a year so the average net tax per person must be around £1,000 a year. We know that the total Child Benefit/Citizen's income for a median household would be £8,000 - £10,000 per year, which neatly back to a net tax bill (LVT minus CI) of around £1,000 per person.

f) Reality check: Business Rates currently raises £25 billion a year from those 0.3 million acres and the LVT raised from commercial land would be £45 billion-odd, so the impact on business is easy to quantify - it would be like scrapping all other taxes and doubling Business Rates. Seeing as all other taxes on business activity are most of the £300 billion a year mentioned above, I think we'd struggle to find a business which ends up paying more in tax, wouldn't we?

So Sobers realised he was on a hiding to nothing with that one and did a volte face; he took my facts and then invented some more arguments against:

2. LVT will favour businesses owned by foreigners, so if we stop taxing their profits, they will remit all their profits overseas again.

No they won't. Why would people take money out of tax-free country like the UK?

3. LVT will favour businesses over households. Most businesses are owned by rich people. Therefore rich people will get even richer. This will be unpopular.

This is not actually true, most of most businesses are owned by small shareholders, usually indirectly via pension funds. Secondly, most of the people near the top of the Times Rich List are oligarchs, bankers, land owners, property developers, owners of patents and other monopolists - they live off government-protected unearned income. LVT (and related taxes) are taxes on monopolies, so the chances are, most people on that Rich List would end up slightly less obscenely wealthy. And I've never been particularly interested in inequalities between people's non-state protected earned incomes - brain surgeons and barristers will always earn more than brick layers or bus drivers - that's just one of those facts of life which we can't do very much about so there's no point worrying about it. The best we can do is allow people to keep all their earned income by scrapping income tax etc and give everybody a share of the unearned income which everybody generates and have done with it.

4. LVT will favour businesses which use hardly any land, such as banks. Sub-text: people hate banks and want to see them taxed more highly.

That's not true either and irrelevant anyway - because most of banks' income is interest on mortgages secured on land, i.e. they are collecting rents. Once the rents are collected by the government and redistributed, banks will only be able to earn money by lending for investment in productive stuff. They won't be able to blow asset price bubbles, so their income will fall. The fact that they will be paying little in corporation tax is irrelevant.

Having explained the impact on banks, we hereby neatly turn a full circle and go back to the more traditional Homey argument which is more or less the opposite of argument 4:

5. If we had LVT, then land prices would fall (yes, this is true) and so all the banks would go bankrupt. Sub-text: we like banks and want them to have more of our money.

If you can bothered to look at the distribution of loans to value and so on and crunch the numbers, we'd know that banks wouldn't go bankrupt, even if house prices halved and everybody in negative equity lost their job, defaulted and declared themselves bankrupt. That's a simple mathematical fact.
----------------------------------
That's why you can't win an argument with a Home-Owner-ist or Faux Libertarian, they have no respect for facts or logic and are quite willing to hold two diametrically opposed views at the same time and flip back and forth between them more or less at will, and if all else fails, they will concede on the facts half way through and then rehash the same old lies again later in the debate.

For them, there are no grey areas which the free markets will sort out, there is black (LVT will mean higher tax bills for some people - choose a few tear jerker categories, Widows In Mansions, the disabled, vulnerable children blah-di-blah, so is bad) and white (LVT will mean lower tax bills for some other people, if we choose a few hate figures who will end up better off, we can persuade the gullible population to stick with the present system).

Never mind the cows...

... people are being attacked by trees in Swindon.*

A DOG-WALKER is worried for public safety after a second tree has come crashing down onto a path within two weeks... Mr Bennett is astonished the council has not acted to protect people from trees he thinks are suffering from dry rot.

The fallen tree comes just two weeks after Mr Bennett was featured in the Adver warning about the state of the trees following the fall of a large willow tree. He is amazed that no one was seriously injured or even killed, as the area is a popular spot with dog walkers and families...

A Swindon Council spokesman said: “We inspect trees that run alongside footpaths every three years and can find no record of problems with the willows in question...."

Every three years, huh? So he's not heard about the deadly tree virus spreading to other species?

* Spotted by Joseph Takagi

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (130)

I linked to an article which claimed that retail prices are slightly lower in London than Swindon, and Sobers (correspondent for farming and Swindon, and as it happens, landowner and hence anti-Land Value Tax campaigner) hit back with one that pointed out that prices were much the same.

Fair enough, for the sake of this discussion, we might as well assume that retail prices are more or less the same anywhere in mainland Great Britain. I resisted the temptation to move the discussion on to LVT, but Anon, in the comments did it for me:

Interesting but as a resident of [London], LVT would probably make things more expensive for me as London shopkeepers who bought their premises at a low price now have to pay high LVT.

Well, exactly not. That's the whole point.

1. We know that rents for retail premises in central London are (say) ten times higher than in e.g. central Swindon, but why? It's not because retailers can charge so much more for clothes, electronic goods, stationery, whatever, in central London, it's because they can sell ten times as many goods from the same size shop. It's not so much that London landlords arbitrarily demand ten times as much in rent, it's that retailers are prepared to pay ten times as much; it's like if there were an alternative fuel to petrol which gave you 400 mpg instead of 40 mpg, then people would be prepared to pay ten times as much for it.

2. We also know that the UK tax system has something very close to LVT, called Business Rates, which is about a third of the total rental value of commercial land and buildings (OK, it's about 40% of the net rental value after deducting Business Rates, a circular calculation which comes out at about a third). So the Business Rates per square yard of retail premises in central London is also ten times as high as the Business Rates per square yard in central Swindon.

3. We know, on the basis of evidence submitted, that retail prices for generic, freely tradeable and easily transportable physical goods are pretty much the same in London or Swindon. Therefore we can safely conclude that Business Rates (and by extension LVT) does not increase the price to the consumer or cut into the profits of the retailer, they merely take a chunk of that balancing figure which would otherwise go to the landlord.

4. The anti-LVT crowd will then retort "Ah, that's fine in principle for tenant businesses, but what about owner-occupier businesses 'who bought their premises at a low price and now have to pay high LVT'?" Well, what of them? They currently pay ten times higher Business Rates in London than in Swindon, which has absolutely no effect on selling prices or the profitability of retailing, so why would replacing Business Rates with LVT have any effect either?

5. We know that some retail premises are rented and some owner-occupied, and that this clearly does not make a difference to retail prices. These big retail chains probably own some of their shops and rent others, but they do not sell for lower prices in the shops they own and for higher prices in the shops they rent. Or, why would a landlord ever rent out his premises to the highest bidder if he could use the shop himself to undercut nearby tenant businesses?

6. As a parting shot, the idea behind full-on LVT is to replace taxes on economic activity with taxes on rental values. When you buy something for £100 in the shops, approx. half of that goes to HM Revenue & Customs (in VAT/import duty, National Insurance, income tax or corporation tax). And to end up with that £100 in your pocket which you spend, you must first create about £200 of value for somebody else. And so on ad infinitum.

7. So the current tax system clearly pushes up retail prices enormously and/or depresses your own income, so even if (which I don't admit), Business Rates or LVT were to push up prices slightly (for which there is no evidence), it's pretty obvious that reducing other taxes, £ for £, would double your employment or business income and/or halve the prices you have to pay in the shops.

Just sayin', is all.

Fairly interesting...

From an article in The Daily Mail a few weeks ago:

Consumers are being hit by a 'postcode lottery' in the cost of buying goods, with some paying at least £500 more for exactly the same items. A study of the prices of 200 items at 12 different locations nationwide revealed that some shoppers are being ripped off and paying up to £537 more than in other areas. Researchers compared the cost of electrical products, homeware, stationery, toys and entertainment.

The average cost of the 200 items came to £15,508 in Swindon, in Wiltshire, and £14,971 in London. Swindon was the most expensive shopping destination in the country with prices £171 above the national average, website Kelkoo discovered.

In Wrexham, north Wales, and Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, customers were paying £164 and £148 above average. Remarkably London, despite its high cost of living, has the cheapest retail prices in the country, with the goods costing £366 less than the average, according to the report. The cost of electrical goods alone was £445 lower in London than it was in Wrexham...

Now, we don't know how rigorous the research was, and it appears to have been carried out by a price comparison website called Kelkoo (who have a vested interest in getting people online to shop around), but it's interesting nonetheless, as it illustrates, yet again, that competition drives prices down. Very crudely speaking, the bigger and less isolated the town, the cheaper things are in the shops.

But remember: this generalisation only applies to physical goods which are both produced and consumed a long distance from the actual point of sale, and which are traded all across the globe. Services, and goods consumed at point of use - i.e. a cup of coffee, a beer, a tank of petrol - are very much more expensive in London because you are paying a lot of embedded rent.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (124)

Flashman submitted the only vaguely coherent counter-argument over at HPC, which kicks off at comment 24:

... there are also such matters as LVT penalising large factories that own their own land. They would continue to pay large amounts of tax even when they are operating at a loss in a recession or when they are operating at loss because of a huge investment. A company like Honda would not tolerate such unjust treatment and they would fly into the arms of a more welcoming country….or would there also have to be some sort of large exemptions on taxing land?

Honda's current tax bill on their Swindon site appears to be over £500 million a year (see footnote).

If all existing taxes were replaced with LVT, their tax bill would be £41 million a year (370 acres x 4,840 x £23/sq yard/year, see earlier workings for SN3 4.. postcode sector).

That looks like a ninety per cent tax cut to me.

At comment 66, Flashman then says " You didn’t address the consequences of a business leaving because they resented (or were bankrupted by) being taxed heavily during a long-term loss-making period... . If you don't support struggling strategic businesses, they have a habit of disappearing or being transferred to foreign ownership."

Yes I did.

I pointed out that cutting somebody's tax bill by ninety per cent strikes me as 'light' taxation rather than 'heavy' taxation (a point which he refused to accept) and there is little need to worry about their factory being transferred to foreign ownership because, er, it's already in foreign ownership.

Anyways, to spell this out, Honda's factory has a capacity of 250,000 cars per year, so in a good year it would pay £900 million in taxes. They had a bad year or two during the recession when its production halved, so in that bad year, its tax bill went down to 'only' £500 million, and in one of those years it received the car scrappage scheme discounts worth maybe £139 million, bringing the net bill down to £361 million. That's still a heck of a lot more than £41 million.

And yes, maybe Honda would blackmail the local council and threaten to leave, knowing that there are one or two bad years ahead in which, of course, they'd prefer to pay £nil in tax rather than £41 million, but they're going to do that anyway in good times and bad, and realistically would they disappear abroad?

a) They've invested £1,380 million in plant and machinery, how much would it cost them to dismantle it all and reassemble it overseas? A damn' sight more than £41 million, I suspect, so if they gamble on things picking up in a year or two, they might well mothball the factory but they would not relocate.

b) And where would they go? That £41 million works out at an average tax bill per car of £311, there is nowhere else in Europe where they'd pay that little. And why would they go to all that trouble of avoiding a £41 million annual tax bill if they'd end up paying £500 million a year elsewhere, even in the bad years?
-----------------------------------------------
To guesstimate Honda's current tax bill:

According to this:
- their factory site in Swindon is 370 acres,
- they have invested £1.38 billion in plant and machinery
- they have 5,000 'associates' (i.e. employees).

According to this, they have 3,000 employees and expect to manufacture 135,000 cars this year (reduced because of Japanese tsunami-related parts shortage).

Their cars sell for between £12,000 and £24,000, let's call it an average of £18,000= VAT of £3,000 per car; plus £1,000 worth of labour per car = PAYE of £400 per car; plus £1,000 profit = corporation tax of £300 per car. This gives us a total of £3,700 tax per car x 135,000 = £500 million a year, plus another £25 million or so in Business Rates.

Ha ha you landless peasants! That's the whole point! This is not an unintended consequence, this is how it was planned!

From The Evening Standard:

Thousands of long-distance commuters are having to pay more for their season tickets than their mortgage.

Research published today shows workers on packed rush-hour trains now need to put aside up to a third of take-home pay - compared with an average 28 per cent for the mortgage bill. Season ticket prices have soared in recent years as the Government seeks to force passengers to contribute more towards the cost of the railways...

For commuters from Swindon to Paddington, a £7,024 annual season ticket is 34.9 per cent of the £20,149 national average take-home pay*. This will rise to 36.9 per cent next year. In 2012, a Norwich-London season ticket will be worth 34.3 per cent of average pay; and one from Bournemouth to the capital will amount to 28.5 per cent.

The Campaign for Better Transport said it was did the research after getting a letter from a commuter saying: "My train fare is now more than my mortgage. I have absolutely no money left for food, clothes, necessities of life."

Why, we wonder, would anybody live in Swindon and commute to London, which costs him or her £7,024 a year? I can only assume that it's because houses are about £200,000 cheaper in Swindon, so our Swindonian saves £10,000 a year on his mortgage (or rent), spends £7,024 on his season ticket and treats the balance as compensation for the extra time he spends commuting.

Sure, the government could tell the wicked, exploitative railway companies that henceforth all train travel is to be free. So what happens then? Existing homeowners in Swindon would be delighted (assuming that 'somebody else' is prepared to pay to subsidise the railway and that service quality does not deteriorate, it would get a bit more crowded for a start). But rents and house prices in Swindon would just go up commensurately, so the next generation would find that they are still no better off living in Swindon than in London.

This is the whole point of Home-Owner-Ism - all existing generations do their best to keep the next generation just above the breadline, and to take as much of their wages off them as possible, whether that's in income tax etc; in rents/mortgage repayments; or in the cost of a season ticket prices.

Why younger generations put up with this is a mystery to me, but hey.

* The comparison with net national average wage is misleading. If they are looking at the cost of a season ticket for Swindon-Paddington, we can safely assume that the commuter lives in Swindon and works in London, so it would be better to compare the cost with the net average wage in London, but hey.

Swindon SN3 land valuation fun

I established that the LVT rate in the postcode district SN3 would be about £30/sq yard/year for residential land, and Sobers, who had prompted the debate, asked:

I hesitate to ask, for fear of being labelled a troublemaker, but what about commercial property? How will that be included in your calculations? I know for a fact for example that SN3 postcode in Swindon contains a fair bit of industrial/commercial/retail property.

That's the easy bit. We just go to the Business Rates section of the VOA website and type in the postcode SN3. The first addresses that came up were on Broadmoor Road, Avro Gate on The South Manston Industrial Estate, SN3 4AG (see map below). I cut and paste the 16 addresses with plot sizes (as I've always said, HMLR know this stuff) and rateable values into a spreadsheet and it told me that the average Business Rates is £21/sq yard/year (you have to times the sq metres by 1.196 to convert to sq yards and times the rateable value by the multiplier 40.7% to work out the tax payable).

The rate I had calculated for residential land in SN3 4.. was £32, so no doubt the businesses on that estate would be over the moon if we scrapped Business Rates (£21/sq yard/year) and VAT, Employer's NIC and corporation tax (which between them cost seven times as much as Business Rates) and replaced them with a Land Value Tax of £32/sq yard/year.

So if anything that rate looks to be 'too low', but those businesses will have to pass on some of the cost savings to their employees in higher wages to cover the higher LVT on residential (NB, on the back of a fag packet, LVT would be ten times as much as council tax - which for some people might be more than the income tax/Employee's NIC that was being deducted before we change all this over) and some of the VAT saving will be passed on to their customers/consumers etc.

View Larger Map

Killer Arguments Against LVT, not (81)

After five years of hard work, I have come to the conclusion that ideal geographical sub-unit for LVT valuation purposes is a postcode sector, which is about 3,000 addresses. To give you a rough idea, at a typical urban/suburban density of twelve homes per acre, that's a circle rather less than a mile across, or ten minutes walking distance from edge to edge. So there wouldn't be a significant difference in values within that area; we take actual recent selling prices, do a bit of averaging, job done.

Sobers begged to differ, swearing blind that there could be huge variations in house prices within one postcode sector, adducing as evidence two physically similar houses in Swindon, postcode district SN3. One is up for auction by the bank which repossessed it, at a starting price of £94,995 and the other is up for a possible sale at £197,500

Nice try, but...

Notwithstanding that one is a repossession (so is being dumped at undervalue) and the other will be sold for rather less than £197,500 or not at all, those two houses are not even in the same postcode sector.

But honour bound, I downloaded the last one thousand recorded sales for the postcode district Swindon SN3 (all sales for the past two years or so) from Houseprices.co.uk and bunged them into a spreadsheet. I selected all semi-detached houses (easiest to understand and most homogeneous), sorted them into six postcode sectors, deleted the bottom and top five per cent in each sector (like all good statisticians do when they are far away at sea - ignore repo's and mortgage fraud) and arrived at the table below (which took me all of half an hour to compile - there are only about 10,000 postcode sectors in the UK, so at this rate, I could work out LVT rates for the whole of the UK in six months).

For clarity:

i. I arranged the postcode sectors by ascending average values.

ii. Standard deviation is a statistical measure. What it means in practice is that if average semi in SN3 2.. is worth £115,000, two-thirds of semi-detached houses in SN3 2... are worth between £103,000 and £128,000, which is not a huge gap,

iii. Just so that you can see I am not cheating, I divided the SD by the average value. The range is fairly tight in each sector and there is no problem with overlap - the most expensive two semi's in the cheapest sector SN3 2.. sold for the same as the cheapest two semi's in the most expensive sector SN3 1..

iv. Assuming average plot size 400 sq yards and a rate of LVT which would be sufficient to replace all other taxes (income tax, National Insurance, VAT, Council Tax, the lot) and leave wiggle room for exempting pensioners and so on, I added the likely LVT rates in the last column. Four of these sectors have rates between £29 and £32 (i.e. hardly worth arguing about). The only noticeable difference is between the cheapest sector, which equates to annual LVT of about £9,200 for a semi, and the most expensive sector, where the annual LVT would be about £15,200. It's unlikely, but possible, that these two sectors are continguous, in which case, no argument.

v. Remember that the flip side of LVT, the Citizen's Income, would be about £11,000 for a two adults-two kids family (education and health vouchers are on top of that), you're not talking about huge sums of money either way.

Click to enlarge:

FakeCharity of the day

Having spent the morning on a family surfing lesson (as in 'the waves' rather than 'the internet') and the afternoon at the Blue Reef Acquarium (which is really good but either a tad expensive or a tad small, depending on your point of view), I haven't had time to trawl the usual sources today, so am indebted, again, to AC1 who asked, completely o/t, "Is Brake a fake?"

From the BBC:

Swindon has become the first English authority to scrap the use of its fixed speed cameras.

The Conservative-run borough council said it was reinvesting the £320,000 a year maintenance costs for the five cameras in road safety measures. The move does not mean the town will be left without any speed cameras as Wiltshire Police will continue to operate mobile units. The decision has been called "reckless" by the road safety charity, Brake...

Leaving aside the question of what "road safety measures' might entail - the article suggests it'll be "vehicle activated signs", i.e. another complete waste of money, let's have a quick look at Brake.

Their website screams fakecharity - it uses the same template as all the others, with sub-pages for 'Home', 'About us', 'Contact us', 'Our supporters' (as a variant on 'Support us' or 'Donate'), 'Jobs' and 'Links'.

The income in their 2007 accounts (see page 8)was as follows:

Corporate partnership £285,718
Donations £333,057
Road Safety Education £296,984
BrakeCare £75,979
Fleet Safety Forum £66,535
Research £3,360
Investment income £15,759

Their list of corporate partners seems innocuous enough. Donations include "Community Fundraising £236,319" (which might or might not be suspect). Note 3 to the accounts discloses income of about £70,000 from the Department for Transport, the Youth Justice Board, the Office for Criminal Justice Reform and the Scottish Executive. Those government departments are all duly listed on their site, along with Children in Need, which you might argue is not a fakecharity.

So far, so not so bad, really. Where it starts to stink a bit is on their list of Organisations working with Brake, which includes, along with some genuinely interested private groups, the following:

British Transport Advisory Committee
Chief Fire Officer Association
Child Accident Prevention Trust
Community Transport Association
Disaster Aftercare Services
European Secure Vehicle Alliance
GMB
The Intensive Care Society
Learn + Live
Motabillity
Pre-Hospital Care
Never Away
Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety
Prospect
Public & Commercial Services Union
Road Operators’ Safety Council
Road Safety Markings Association
The Slower Speeds Initiative
Transport & General Workers Union
Transport Management Association of the NHS
University of Huddersfield

All of which appear to be quangos, fakecharities, public sector pressure groups and/or wholly or party funded or arganised by the government (there may be exceptions and I am happy to edit that list down a bit).

So, to cut a long story short, Brake appears to be, to a large extent, a fake.