We are opposed to wealth taxes. It might seem pedantic to say so but land is not wealth and a land title is not wealth but a piece of paper which is a claim on wealth ie the rental income stream from the land. It is easy to value land. The valuations can be put on a public register for everyone to see and question if they wish. As long as the valuations are revised regularly – not less than...

Labour leader Milliband’s new-found support for a 10p tax rate and a Mansion Tax at the same time is the worst of politics and an insult to the intelligence of the electorate. A short band of income tax at 10% is inefficient and complex. The way to cut the tax burden on the low-paid is to raise the starting threshold. And that is before tax incidence is taken into account, because the initial...

A nice little welfare handout for landowners was slipped almost unnoticed into the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement last week. New developments will be exempt from empty property rates from next October: all newly built commercial property completed between 1 October 2013 and 30 September 2016 will be exempt from empty property rates for the first 18 months. This is described as “a victory...

Labour MP Jackie Ashley, writing in the Guardian today, complains about the tax avoidance antics of firms like Amazon. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE, she says. That something appears to be getting the tax authorities to act in a more aggressive way. But since this tax avoidance is legal, there is nothing that HMRC can do about it under present legislation – which Labour had thirteen years to do...

The Labour Party has climbed onto the bandwagon of concern about tax avoidance by issuing what it calls a “Challenge Paper” which tells us that “Labour believes addressing tax avoidance at both an individual and corporate level must be a priority. At home, this means making it plain to the Crown Dependencies that we will expect them to observe the letter and the spirit of the law...

Between them, Chancellor George Osborne and Local Government minister Eric Pickles, have missed the opportunity to reform Britain’s property tax and made a mess of things instead. We reported previously that the government had decided to defer the UBR revaluation for two years, until 2017. The FT now reports that “Colliers International, the property agency – which has described...

More tax avoidance humbug from Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. The comments are generally not much better, falling into two categories. Those in the first express the faux-libertarian view that all taxation is theft. The alternative view is indignation, accompanied by a call for greater toughness. It seems not to be appreciated that if an action is immoral but legal, which by definition, is the case...

Representatives from the big trans-national tax avoiders – Google, Amazon and Starbucks, had a grilling by MPs yesterday. But the rogues missed a trick. These companies’ obligations to the British government begin and end with the value of the infrastructure that they enjoy in the UK. That’s it. This is fully reflected in the land value element of the rents they pay on the properties...

The Bill sponsored by Green MP for Brighton Caroline Lucas has now been published. The citation is“A Bill to require the Secretary of State to commission a programme of research into the merits of replacing the Council Tax and Non-domestic rates in England with an annual levy on the unimproved value of all land, including transitional arrangements; to report to Parliament within 12 months...

We were pleased to note the formation of a group called “Forward“, which describes itself as “a policy think tank created, developed and run by students from across the United Kingdom. It aims to facilitate policy discussions on current affairs within the areas of Development.” It is expressly supportive of land value taxation.