Its not a cliff edge as reported, its a tax on the value above 500k. But until they announce it we are just guessing.
Mortgage Rate Rises
- Thread starter glenimp617
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Stamp duty land tax is a bad tax and should be fully abolished - pretty much every economist agrees.
The issue is what to replace it with, best suggestion is to replace it with a land value tax. This is not a property tax, it only taxes the value of the land.
This encourages people to improve what’s on the land but doesn’t then lead to more tax.
Where as with a property tax would have the opposite impact, if you stick an extension on it or make it more desirable in another way (e.g. refurbish), you get taxed more. This would encourage people to leave their property to go to rack and ruin until they needed to sell it.
The issue is what to replace it with, best suggestion is to replace it with a land value tax. This is not a property tax, it only taxes the value of the land.
This encourages people to improve what’s on the land but doesn’t then lead to more tax.
Where as with a property tax would have the opposite impact, if you stick an extension on it or make it more desirable in another way (e.g. refurbish), you get taxed more. This would encourage people to leave their property to go to rack and ruin until they needed to sell it.
Amusingly those proposed council tax / property tax changes would actually reduce my annual bill to the proposed cap of £2200/year (down from ~ £3600/year at the moment).
Soldato
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Vat is double tax as well. Many others too eg beer tax.
Well i've just submitted another missed recycling collection complaint - my street has been missed for the second week in a row, now... I had to drive mine to a recycling center a few miles away as it was really starting to pile up.
Do I get a CT discount? do I hekers!
All I can do is complain and keep paying, like a total mug.
Do I get a CT discount? do I hekers!
All I can do is complain and keep paying, like a total mug.
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True but technically (that word is going a lot of heavy lifting) VAT is a luxury tax so supposedly aimed at those who can pay.
Alcohol and tobacco taxes are to dissuade you from consuming them
SDLT is neither of those things.. well, depending on where you live I guess
Soldato
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How much discount are you expecting?
The admin costs involved that they'd have to charge through CT will be higher than the £6 or whatever cost per bin
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Be careful what you wish for.
There are proposals to overhaul the stamp duty rules so that sellers pay a lifetime tax when selling a property and replace council tax with an annual property tax too.
Is stamp duty changing? Here's what we know so far | Property news
The government is considering replacing stamp duty with an annual property tax for homes over £500,000, paid by sellers rather than buyerswww.rightmove.co.uk
[Edit] Basically lowering the cost for first time buyers, but putting sellers on the hook for an additional annual property tax
I'd hope there are harsher penalties with a property tax. Empty housing = penalty rate which multiplies for every year the property remains empty. Even to the point of 'abandoned' land - there's a plot of land not far from where I live that has basically been turned into a junk yard because the owner seems to want to sit on the land whilst it keeps jumping in value every year.
As a country we should be doing everything possible to discourage hoarding of land and property when it could be put to use.
1 hour of my time at mimimum wage, to drive it to the recycling center and back home - £12.21 - round it up to £15 for petrol, pro-rata wear and tear on my car, car insurance etc.
I'd hazard £15 per missed collection, per household, would be fair without runing the numbers properly.
Or alternativley they can knock £60 per month ( or £720 per year) off my CT bill and I'll take care of my own bins - that would save the council all the admin of refunding me for thier failiures.
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I think most people are in the mindset that they wouldn't object to paying more tax, but as long as there's an actual benefit for the public. What seems to happen time and time again (and with both Labour/Conservative governments) is they get the occasional budget surplus and it just gets ****** up the wall.
Increased taxation also needs to be fair, I do accept that earning more means having to pay more tax than someone earning a lot less. What's not OK is having to pay increased taxation when someone who's choosing not to contribute economically.
I think the biggest issue with taxing the value of a house outside of sales is that we have created a ridiculously inflated property bubble. I would put a large amount of money that house prices are probably about double what the average person can actually afford in "wealthy" areas of the country. I would bet that there are a huge number of people in million pound plus houses around me that wouldn't be able to afford half the house they are living in if they had their careers nowadays. They have simply benefitted from being born into the right generation.
This does not compute. I think it must be incorrect reporting/misunderstanding. I can't see how it would make any sense at all for a seller to pay a lifetime tax for selling a property.
You would think so because it frees up those houses potentially but who can afford them? They aren’t magically going to drop 25%. The owners will just find ways to pay the new tax and still sit in them. They might drop a bit in price but not that much.
A land value tax based on the m2 of the plot rather than a property tax is considered to be the gold standard.
Land value tax doesn’t penalise someone for improving the property on the land, it more simply equates to more land = more tax regardless of what’s on it.
It’s largely redundant anyway because I doubt they will have the political capital to go through with it because there are too many losers who will shout about it.
The country simply isn’t in the place of major tax reforms like these, just look at the complete meltdown in relation to the council tax re-valuation in Wales.
Land value tax doesn’t penalise someone for improving the property on the land, it more simply equates to more land = more tax regardless of what’s on it.
It’s largely redundant anyway because I doubt they will have the political capital to go through with it because there are too many losers who will shout about it.
The country simply isn’t in the place of major tax reforms like these, just look at the complete meltdown in relation to the council tax re-valuation in Wales.
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Yes, there are older private and council estates with twice the land area of newer estates because at the time of building land was relatively cheap. Three storey terraced town houses on miniscule plots seems to be the gold standard for planners and builders which would attract minimum land value based on acreage. Maybe an air tax.
Yes, there are older private and council estates with twice the land area of newer estates because at the time of building land was relatively cheap. Three storey terraced town houses on miniscule plots seems to be the gold standard for planners and builders which would attract minimum land value based on acreage. Maybe an air tax.
I am on the outskirts of a relatively new estate (house is 6 years old). Looking out my window at the older houses over the road, you could fit about 2.5x of my plot onto their's, even though they are semi-detached and the actual house part is similar size.
Good thing I never wanted a huge garden I guess.
That doesn't make much sense. Thats essentially a garden tax. I was looking at a house that we didn't buy in the end because the garden was too big and the house wasn't quite what we wanted. Without massive amounts of work and agreement from probably 4 other people there is nothing you can do with that garden to make it more productive. I reckon that the garden was about 3 times the size of even large gardens around here. Should that have a higher tax rate than a house 10 minutes away in a fancier area that is worth twice as much but doesn't have as much garden?
There is no "fair" way to do it but incentivising everyone (including builders) to create the most dystopian housing estates that have postage stamp gardens doesn't seem sensible.
As I said above, I don't know how you make it remotely fair. There are a lot of boomers sitting on properties worth insane money that they couldn't have afforded if housing wasn't effectively dirt cheap in their day. There are areas of the country where people plough a huge amount of their income into a house because thats the only way they can afford anything remotely suitable. Our next house will be expensive by any normal persons view but around here? Not so much. Its the sort of house we could get for half the cost in many parts of the country. People that earn well enough to afford a reasonable house are already getting squeezed left right and centre on their salary and everything else. Hitting them again for buying what is a modest house in an expensive area seems a bit mad.
The changes need to do a few things IMO.
- Make downsizing and freeing up housing stock for the working population an attractive prospect.
- Allow a fluid housing market where people are not locked into inappropriate properties. People should be able to easily more for schools, jobs and life changes.
- Still bring in a reasonable amount of money to replace the SDLT it replaces
Fundamentally we need to get a hold on house prices and houses being an investment rather than a home and we need to grow our economy. Everything else is just much of a muchness.
It’s precisely how most sensible countries do ‘property’ taxes and it’s seen to be the gold standard. Stamp duty is considered to be one of the worst kinds of land tax and would be abolished and replaced with this.
It doesn’t punish you for improving the property on the land so it encourages people to do those things because it increases the resale value of the land but not the tax cost.
It doesn’t really impact developers because gardens are already the minimum size they can get away with under the planning process overseen by local authorities (more houses = more profit regardless of garden size).
Not all land attracts the same rate of tax. The tax in central London will be significantly more per square meter than rural Lincolnshire. But my plot of land which is bigger than my neighbours will attract more tax.
It also encourages efficient use of land because It also encourages people to only buy the land they actually want/need.
It combats land banking because as soon as it is designated as residential, the land tax starts so developers are incentivised to get on with building or sell the land.