Wednesday 22 October 2014

The Good Old Days

Simon Jenkins in yesterday's Evening Standard:

The new proposed rate of £3,000 ['Mansion Tax' on homes worth £2 - £5 million] will come on top of the average of £2,000 that H-band properties already pay in council tax. Indeed, London valuations are so out of date that many bands E, F and G may pay mansion tax.

But the total tax will still be way below what such properties would be paying had the old rates been indexed rather than abolished (for the poll tax) in 1989. Tony Travers, the local government expert at LSE, estimates that the rates on “mansion-taxable” properties would today be in the range of £6,000 to £20,000 a year.


It's not that far off actually, if you add Council Tax and Mansion Tax together. So anybody who bought pre-1989, i.e. all the Poor Widows In Mansions, has no reason to complain; that's what they signed up for.

3 comments:

mombers said...

Would be interesting to see what the median income tax and NI bill has done during the time that the top rates bills went from £20k to £3k...

Kj said...

The piece is good further down as well IMO, not as a KLN, but as a critisism against MT as a separate tax to woo the lefties.

Graeme said...

as I recall, the reason Thatcher opted for a a poll tax was because there had just been a rates revaluation in Scotland, which had provoked massive discontent. Surprisingly, no one (apart possibly from Lawson) warned her that a poll tax would cause even more unrest. I think that Lawson suggested revaluing the rateable value of a property every time it was sold, which is an interesting approach. The "poor widow" would not be faced with rate rises but buyers would know in advance what their bill would be.