Friday 22 November 2013

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (308)

A comment at localgov.co.uk:

Land Value Tax was tried by Labour in the 1960s and was a catastrophic failure. Landowners simply refused to sell: why should they?

And we already have a near-equivalent: S106 roof tax running at £20K per house, and builders obliged to give away 40% of their sites as social housing. The result? Barely viable sites and a reluctance to build.

Why bother when planning policies starve builders of sites and taxation policies make most of them financially unviable?

Antony Atkins, Added: Friday, 22 November 2013 09:17 AM


This is a fairly standard smart-arse Homey tactic, and can be politely referred to as "Telling a Big Fat Lie". The planning gains supplement, in all its names and guises is not Land Value Tax, it is the opposite of Land Value Tax and has predictable effects.

And he's obviously not read any homebuilders' financial statements in which they boast of their massive landbanks (about nine years' worth of supply) and state quite clearly that these are long term investments expected to produce super-returns whether they are built on or not etc.

2 comments:

Ian Hills said...

Anyone would think the anti-LVT lobby was sponsored by speculators, sorry, developers.

Mark Wadsworth said...

IH, they give plenty of money to Policy Exchange!