Pity the poor widow under LVT

People express concern about the fate of poor widows under LVT but I am more concerned about the likes of Miss Havisham, who was unmarried but had lost her fortune through being defrauded by her husband-to-be. But there is this sad story too. A 96 year old widow is in the same two-up two-down with an outside toilet that she moved into in 1946 when she was 30 years old. She had married at the start of the war and her husband fought in the Far East and was captured by the Japanese. He bought the house, badly dilapidated, for £250 with the help of his demob money. They patched it up in what little spare time they had, and a couple of children came along. Unfortunately whilst in the hands of the Japanese he had picked up a tropical disease from which he never recovered, and after a few years of ill-health died in the early 1950s. After that his widow worked for a meagre wage to supplement her army pension. By living frugally, she managed to bring up the children and build up a pot of money in a private pension scheme. But that collapsed due to Gordon Brown’s pensions raid, and now she is left with barely enough to get by. Nevertheless, she still does a lot of work in the local Oxfam Shop. The house is now worth £2 million. Under an LVT system she is going to be living on the streets.

The sorry story would be compounded by the problems her grandchildren will face. They are currently priced out of the market and so she would like them to inherit the £2 million house to divide between them and use as deposits to help them onto the ladder and give them a good start in life. But under LVT, houses will become even more expensive, because the price of houses will have to go up to pay the LVT. Worse still, LVT will make her grandchildren homeless as well as they will not be able to afford the rent on their current homes because the landlord will add the LVT to the rent.

Which sums up the nonsensical arguments against LVT currently doing the rounds.