Tax land not cut inheritance tax say Labour Land Campaign - good for them.

I was pleased to receive the following press release from the Labour Land Campaign this morning.

wwwlabourland.org 

The Tory’s proposal to cut inheritance tax on homes valued at £1 million 
means even more subsidies for the rich

The Labour Land Campaign says the Conservative party’s latest policy 
announcement to remove inheritance tax on homes worth up to £1 million 
is outrageous.  With Council Tax bills for mansions in Mayfair at no 
more than £2,124.66 per annum, home owners are already extremely 
privileged with regard to taxation and have been since the demise of the 
Domestic Rating System. This is part of the cause of house price 
inflation.

House prices have, once again, reached an unsustainable level but the 
owners have done nothing to earn this increase in their wealth. As well 
as a crisis for those unfortunates who are not on the ‘housing ladder’, 
do we not have a major problem of wealth inequality in the UK? And is 
not inheritance of houses one of the main drivers of this trend?

It should be realised that a good part of the value of any property – 
and all of the increase in value over the last period - is land value 
that has been created by the whole of society from public and private 
investments that we fund as taxpayers, consumers and investors.
Heather Wetzel, Vice Chair of the Labour Land Campaign says “the land 
under our homes was provided by nature and the value of that land has 
been generated from continual public and private investment in our 
public transport networks, roads, schools, health care, parks, commerce 
etc. The Tories’ latest policy is giving another subsidy – up to 
£400,000 - to the richest in the UK at the expense of our NHS and other 
vital public services.“

“We need to shift taxes off incomes and on to the unearned incomes land 
owners receive by taxing the value of all land in the UK.  Then, instead 
of the richest land owners taking the unearned income they receive from 
‘owning’ this natural resource, land speculation would stop and empty 
buildings and idle development sites would be brought into full use.  
Most politicians and economists ignore the fact that homes actually have 
two values - the value of the building and the value of the land it is 
located on.  Location value differs according to the level of investment 
in local infrastructure, public services and business.  For example 
taxpayers from all over the UK have contributed to the building of 
Crossrail that is seeing the value of the land under homes in its 
catchment area rise enormously.  This land value should be returned to 
the public purse to replace those taxes that penalise work and good 
investments and certainly not go to those inheriting the property.  This 
latest Tory policy is bad, unjust and is yet another policy that 
benefits the richest in the UK at the expense of the poorest.”

The Labour Land Campaign campaigns for a tax system that is fair, 
unavoidable and redistributive and one that collects natural resource 
wealth including land wealth which the whole of society creates, to use 
to maintain and develop our public services. We advocate the reduction 
or abolition of those negative taxes that discriminate against poorer 
people and regions of low investment and replace them with an annual 
Land Value Tax that will capture land value that results from public and 
private investments which goes as unearned income to land owners.  We 
say the current tax system is skewed in favour of the rich, 
multinationals and London and the South East of England at the expense 
of people on low incomes, small and medium sized businesses and regions 
of low investment.