From Paisley Daily Express:
A HOMELESS charity has slammed the UK Government for deciding to press ahead with penalties for social housing tenants who ‘under-occupy’ their homes.
Shelter Scotland are fuming with MPs for voting to overturn House of Lords changes to the controversial Welfare Reform Bill. One aspect is to deduct housing benefit from tenants who have one or more spare rooms, which has become known as a "bedroom tax"...
Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland, said: "Penalising low-income people for having an extra room assumes there is a ready supply of smaller properties. The consequence will be people stuck in homes with mounting arrears."
That is positively weird.
There's a given amount of social housing, and a heck of long waiting list, and many of the people on the list are homeless. So if reducing homelessness is your thing, then trying to encourage full usage of what social housing there is must be the way forward; price rationing is the best form of rationing, so hiking the cost a bit for people who 'under-occupy' seems like a good plan to me. NB: I thought that such a family over-occupies; but the dwelling is under-occupied, I'm not sure if the article gets these the right way round.
But somehow... the whole thing reminds me of the Poor Widow In A Mansion who has been wheeled out a million times and presented as an argument against LVT, and I for am not buying it. If, for example, the government suggesting scrapping the nonsensical single person's discount for Council Tax, The Daily Mail would be trotting exactly the same non-argument as Shelter do, only on behalf a different special interest group.
Deiying
56 minutes ago
15 comments:
Its even more weird as housung benefit is payed to house landlords so how can anyone end up "in arrears" as the charity says
Once you accept the logic of Georgist LVT much other logic flows from it.
Poor Widows in Big houses would gradually disappear as the citzen was weaned off housing as saving and 'wealth creation'. You'd still have old dears rattling around in big houses but they would have other wealth to pay for it.
As regards housing provided by the taxpayer for those to rent who can't/haven't/won't buy other 'social' issues arise. Yes, such properties will be more expensive to rent but they may still be able to afford it, and as long as they were not being subsidised why shouldn't they stay there?
And proper use of LVT / citizens divided (or share of land rent) would tend to eliminate housing waiting lists.
But I am not happy about the current settlement where functionaries have too much power - it's like Rosemary's Baby in reverse. But I can quite see that Something Has To Be Done.
looks like open plan interior design is going to be de rigueur for housing benefit tennants
the nonsensical single person's discount for Council Tax
What's "nonsensical" about it? The idea of Council Tax is to pay (or at least contribute towards) the cost of services provided by the council. Houses don't consume council services, people do. Personally I reckoned that the deeply-manipulated "Poll Tax" was the fairest way, but the government was sompletely outmanouvered by a large number of councils who managed to effectively implement anything up to 100% rate rises and blame it on the Tories..
Din 17.26, even if HB is paid direct to landlords, said over-occupiers will have to make up a £20 shortfall (or however much it is) every week out of their other benefits.
L: "I am not happy about the current settlement where functionaries have too much power" Me neither.
Din 17.38, I once knew a lass in a council flat who'd sub-divided one large bedroom so that her two kids could have a bed room each. Would the council count that as one or two? (that said, she went out to work and refused to live off benefits anyway).
Pogo, do you seriously believe the myth that council tax pays for all local services? It pays for about one-tenth of the cost. And even if that were true, what then is the rationale for income tax?
" Houses don't consume council services, people do."
Again, wrong. The government and society in general provide services, landowners consume them.
In any event, you are completely confusing 'spending' side with 'tax raising' side of the equation, the simple fact is that on the tax raising side, LVT is far better than income tax, poll tax, or just about any tax.
Off-topic but Econlog is attacking LVT on grounds of search costs. I can't post there because I think I'm banned for calling someone a "clown".
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/02/a_search-theore.html
RA, done. I can see how you found it difficult to resist calling these people clowns.
@Mark... Of course I don't think that council tax covers all council expenditure - I thought that it was about 25% not 10%. However, it's rationale is that it's "paying for services rendered"..
The government and society in general provide services, landowners consume them.
Bollocks! People consume services. My garden, for instance, consumes nothing supplied by the council, neither does my house. The people living in it are the consumers.
I fear that you let your, somewhat irrational fanaticism for LVT cloud your view of reality at times.
P, yes, in the final analysis landowners do consume services and/or impose a burden on others. These are observable facts.
- If you didn't have a garden, then other people would have been able to build their own houses that little bit closer to the station, the school, the park, the shops.
- You are still confusing the SPENDING side with the TAX RAISING side.
- Can you explain why a high earner consumes more services than a low earner? If he does not, then there is no justification for income tax.
- Things like education are not a service provided solely for the benefit of, and hence consumed by children, we as a society pay for education because that makes us as a society richer.
- Things like health care are a mish mash of public benefit and private benefit. Clearly, immunisation of children or preventing epidemics is of wider public benefit but old age care has little benefit to society as a whole.
- As it happens, this is on the spending side, but the Homeys would be up in arms if we said that we were going to shut down the NHS and make old people pay for the cost of their care - they'd find it cheaper to pay LVT.
- If you think that poll tax is a better tax than income tax, then why not make the poll tax proportional to the VALUE of services received by the landowner? Do you seriously maintain that the owner of an apartment overlooking Hyde Park gets the same VALUE from society as the owner of a council flat in [some grim area]?
- Clearly, you've been conditioned to look at things through the Home-Owner-Ist prism, but it's full of contradictions, isn't it? That's what I would refer to as 'irrational fanaticism'. It's not in any way coherent and constantly jumbles SPENDING with REVENUE. These are two separate topics.
- My view is not full of contradictions, I just describe things how they are.
"but the government was sompletely outmanouvered by a large number of councils who managed to effectively implement anything up to 100% rate rises and blame it on the Tories.."
To use your phraseology, bollocks! The Poll Tax failed because it shifted the bulk of the taxation from better-off people to worse-off people. You obviously think it fair that someone on the dole should pay the same tax as the chairman of Barclays Bank, but the majority of the inhabitants of the country didn't. Whether that was for the right reasons or not, that is democracy, and if the little people have to riot before the big people listen to them and some democracy happens, then they have to riot.
The only "fair" way for everyone to contribute for the services provided by the council proportionally to the extent to which they "consume" them, is for there to be no services provided by the council for which people do not pay at point of use.
Mark - you've climbed onto your hobbyhorse and belted off at a tangent...
I was discussing the nonsensical single person's discount for Council Tax nothing else. Not Income Tax, not VAT, etc. Council Tax, get it?
I agree with you completely that the tax system is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and downright lunacy - but it could be claimed, justifiably in my opinion, that as Council Tax is supposedly raised in order to conribute towards local services (unlike all the other taxes) a one-person household is, on average, likely to make smaller demands on said services and thus merits a discount. Nothing more.
@Bayard:
You obviously think it fair that someone on the dole should pay the same tax as the chairman of Barclays Bank,
For council services, yes, I do. They pay the same for a can of beans at the supermarket or are you suggesting that there should be a sliding scale of food prices based upon one's income? So where's the difference between that and a contribution towards local services - of which they're likely to make greater demands than the posited plutocrat.
Birmingham council, where I had the "good fortune" to live at the time, set its poll tax at a level that equated to a 90% rise over the previous year's rates. They weren't alone in this. The only "rioting" done, instigated and encouraged by some of the more radical elements in local politics, was mainly by the great unwashed - who didn't have to pay the bloody thing anyway
B, ta.
P, as Bayard says: "The only "fair" way for everyone to contribute for the services provided by the council proportionally to the extent to which they "consume" them, is for there to be no services provided by the council for which people do not pay at point of use"
1. Your single person households are most likely to be widowed pensioners, who would not possibly be able to afford healthcare if it were not free at point of use. Young single people use next to no 'public services', but they'd be able to afford the higher council tax and/or they'd get somebody to share their home.
2. We have a limited supply of housing, the NIMBYs are always wailing about The Hallowed Green Belt and so on, so why do we celebrate a fiddly tax break which discourages efficient use of housing?
3. "Council Tax is supposedly raised in order to conribute towards local services"
Yes, 'supposedly' is the operative word, but if we are to have an efficient government, why not make it more responsive to what people want by having it raise money by charging for VALUE actually provided to landowners, rather than levying a compulsory and arbitrary charge for the COST of services, many of which do not add value?
On the tax raising side, the ideal is for them to charge for VALUE of services provided. Then we have the spending side, and they would focus on things which ADD VALUE, just like any other business. So the myth about council tax is not only factually incorrect, it still confuses the tax raising side and the spending side.
P: "@Bayard... For council services, yes, I do. They pay the same for a can of beans at the supermarket or are you suggesting that there should be a sliding scale of food prices based upon one's income?
No he did not say that.
Do you not understand that a poor person buys a tin of beans for 50p and the bank manager buys steak for £10? The supermarket charges for the VALUE of what it provides and people then buy what they need/can afford/want.
It's the same with LVT.
A poor person in a small flat in a crap area gets a lot less value from the land he owns than a bank manager in a villa. So clearly, the bank manager in the nice big house overlooking the park pays more than the poor person etc.
As to your accusation that Bayard (or I) want "a sliding scale of food prices based upon one's income?" that is exactly what we DON'T WANT!
The Home-Owner-Ists achieve exactly this by having taxes on INCOME which is the bulk of all tax revenues and pays for the ninety per cent of 'local spending' not covered by council tax.
So in effect, the high earner does pay a hundred times as much for local services as the low earner.
Which is OK if the high earner also lives in the nice big house (the injustice on both sides cancels out), but what about high earners in small flats? They get f-ed over on both sides of the equation. It's these people whose side we are on.
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