Tax land: it cannot be put in a bank in Panama and we know where the wealthy live to collect the tax in the UK

14 April 2016


There has never been a better time to write about Land Value tax because the wealthy cannot put their UK land into a bank in Panama and we know where they live to collect the tax in the UK.

Taxpayers Against Poverty has been campaigning for Land Value Tax (LVT) since we were founded by a letter the Guardian on the 16th February 2012.

It will "encourage" the four largest builders to use the 600,000 plots hoarded in their land banks to create homes or jobs to make a profit and pay the tax. The Harrisburg, Pennsylvania website reports their very positive experience of LVT. It it also works well in Denmark, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

My colleague Fred Harrison of the Land Research Trust has expanded on his website on the positive effects of LVT.

It would be a progressive tax replacing inefficient and/or regressive council tax, business rates, stamp duty and inheritance tax.

I am still refusing to pay my council tax as an act of civil disobedience against a deeply unjust law.

Council tax is hitting the poorest ever harder because Osborne freezes, caps or cuts the benefits that have to pay the tax and rents go ever higher; the laws enforcing the council tax are brutal​,​ while the wealthy park their tax free money in overseas banks.

That has to stop because it makes benefit claimants hungry and ill, which increases the costs in the health service.

A single woman cannot buy a healthy diet cook it and keep warm on JSA of £73.10 a week leading​ to​ increased risks of poor maternal nutrition, low birthweight and mental health problems for their off spring

The biggest injustice in modern society is the difference in life expectancy. I was born in Kensington where the expectation of life is 88 years. Aged 83 I now live in Tottenham between two wards where the expectation of life is 71 years, a 17 year difference. Anyone round here born in the same year as me in 1932 died, on average, 12 years ago. ​Facts​ disgracefully ignored by central and local government.

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Haringey taxes benefits with council tax; Kensington and Chelsea do not.

It is crazily inefficient and oppressive for central government to provide benefit incomes for the survival and shelter of the poorest people in the UK while the local authorities take it away with council tax, then enforce the tax with court costs and bailiffs fees.

Rev Paul Nicolson