People always say that LVT is impracticable because it would be impossible to keep up-to-date valuations on 20 million privately homes (plus 2 million or so business premises), rebutted at point 6.
My guess is that it won't take more than five minutes for a drone at HM Land Registry to input the extra items of info (rebuild costs and plot size) that will have to be included on the transfer form TR1 in order to generate reasonably accurate site-only location values.
Less than two million homes are sold each year; one person can do twelve forms an hour x thirty five hours a week x forty seven weeks a year = twenty thousand forms per full-time worker per year, so it would need a hundred extra staff, tops. And this would be a low-skill job that school leavers, part-timers and people-between-proper-jobs could do. Plus half a dozen IT-graduates who go round with oily rags and spanners doing computer maintenance and a tea lady.
Obviously, these would replace the bulk of the 4,300 relatively expensive, relatively experienced staff at the Valuation Office Agency, nine hundred of whom have threatened to go on strike.
And as LVT would replace Council Tax, Stamp Duty Land Tax, Inheritance Tax, Capital Gains Tax and the TV Licence fee (see point 1), that must be another ten thousand or two superfluous jobs that could go.
Plod and Mental Health
1 hour ago
7 comments:
Plus half a dozen IT-graduates who go round with oily rags and spanners doing computer maintenance and a tea lady.
WHIT?
STB.
So how come only the IT graduates get to do the tea lady ... that's a bit elitist, isn't it ?
And, of course, it's rather unusual for this duty to be included in a tea lady's job spec.
No no, you misunderstand - the IT-graduates walk round with oily rags. The spanners will do the maintenance and the tea lady.
It didn't prove difficult in Scotland to update Rateable Value regularly, in the days of The Rates. The consequence was, however, national outrage at the increases in Rates during the last great house price boom (which, you may remember, is why Scotland first tried the Poll Tax).
D, you can look at it the other way. I am all in favour of cutting all the waste out of gummint spending, as much as 20% of all spending or about £100 bn, and cutting taxes on production and incomes to get the economy going.
But as previous dashes for growth and the Brown Bubble have shown, until there are enough productive things to invest your money in, it all just goes into unproductive assets, aka a house price bubble.
So you need LVT to continually divert money from unproductive to productive investment. And if you get more LVT you can cut taxes on production and income even more and so on in a virtuous circle.
LVT will replace all those other taxes?
What dreamworld are you living in?
When did any new tax ever replace an older one.
It'll be as well as, just like all the others.
And no public sector jobs will in any way be endangered; in fact, it will turn out that a whole lot more are needed.
Just like every other time.
A, I am a simplification campaigner who understands tax, economics, housing and welfare. I live in a dreamworld where the entire tax and welfare system can be summed up in four or five pages and where taxes and welfare is designed so as to impede the free market economy as little as possible and where there are hardly any civil servants. So pretty f***ing Utopian, really.
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