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f***ing criminal
And we thought we’d seen the worst of it with Truss.
Hum. Some of that can be explained by demographics and I do not agree with throwing elderly people out of their homes by sneaky legislative and tax measures Geoff. Which is no doubt what some supporters of such articles are trying to foment.
Oh dear. I don’t quite have this interpretation.
Something the article does suggest in principle, is that owners of larger houses should be assessed for Council tax by number of bedrooms, as sales agencies do. The present situation is the opposite
The ethic behind the article, albeit it a smidge socialist, is that the latest population census tells there is a substantial amount of houses with more bedrooms than occupants. Some are secondary homes with owners abroad or holiday homes, not occupied full time. Meanwhile, in the 21st century there are many people in need of housing, particularly in urban locations.
So far, so true.
However, a Council tax on square footage may annoy the wealthier but they will pay and keep their half empty properties. Property is after all, an escalating investment. But that will not liberate more accommodation for others, either to rent or buy. And without heavier rent controls the renters suffer anyway.
Regarding the elderly being thrown out of their homes, I don’t think this is what the article suggests or wants. It looks as though some elderly may be capital (property) rich whilst being income poor. This, especially in London.
What may be the next proposal, but possibly not during a Tory government, is to create a way for the elderly with large homes, which they may or not be struggling to heat and maintain, to sell for downsizing to a new home.
What form such an advantage may take is hard to imagine but purchase tax free on the new property might be a start. There are also issues regarding inheritance tax that may need sorting.
Sadly, relocation to a less expensive and/or less populated new area may not be ideal in the eyes of pensioners who have lived a long time and have social connections in their neighbourhood.
Nice idea but when you factor in the people who own these large homes and their emotional ties it doesn’t work and what rjght has any government to try,
I was brought up in a ‘large’ house which was our family home for 60 years. Gradually as me and my siblings left and then wuth the loss of my mother too soon it left my father rattling around the house but he had no intention of downsizing. At one point I acquired planning permission in the grounds for a compact bungalow for easy living and my father didn’t speak to me for 3 years!
He spent 30 plus years living alone in the house because it was his, He died at 92 but it would have been so much earlier had he been forced from the place that held the comfort and memories of his life.
The house is now resigned to history, replaced by multiple housing fit for purpose however to achieve this was not easy with the planning system that exists in the UK, seems to me that a country crying out for new housing has a planning system that buts every obstacle possible in the way to stop it, unless your name is Wimpey or Barrett.
Our family home was a fantastic place to live and although now gone I can revisit at any time in my mind, and do.
‘Yorkshire Bred’ tells the story of my family home.
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I do that with my maternal grandparents’ home
Houses can be more than bricks and mortar. My aunt, her husband and my cousins lived in just an ordinary rented council house that was never theirs. When she was the last to occupy it, her husband having died before her, and she died and it was given up, I realised I could never be in that place again with all its memories, and it was quite a wrench.
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My husband tells me that Council tax used to be based on the possible rental value of the property. Is this still the case? I cannot imagine it can be in central London.
My cousin is a 71 year old actress living in a 3 bedroom home in Chelsea. She is very happy there, where she has been for over 30 years within a brisk walk of friends, the river, Konigstrasse and Chelsea Physic Garden.
I think that if more central London homes are needed that empty foreign owned ones should be the first targets. Cannot see it actually happening though because there is too much power behind them.
Not all young people want to live with an hour or two’s commute in to work every day, so extending the borders of Inner London with new housing is not a perfect solution either.
I am so glad that I do not work in urban planning!
That’s my point Susannah you are advocating forcing elderly people to move.
The issue is that with the evolution of the UK economy there are pensioners of limited income having the family home. No they should not be forced to uproot from where they spent their life, due to some socialist ideals.
To pacify the greedy socialist b*$tard$, remember : Guess what pensioners do? They die. The socialists will get their hands on a person’s property soon enough.
Such a bubble will soon feed through and stop happening as well. As due to property price inflation since many decades now, the number of income-poor but temporarily having a valuable and possibly too large property for not forever till they die, is about to become much less very soon.
And just to make you happier, since the UK’s bungling, corruption and neglect got so many pensioners killed earlier than they should have gone, and not just through Covid, UK inheritance tax takings are now through the roof. Rishi has locked this down as well by freezing tax allowances, including inheritance.
So don’t worry: poverty will be further socialised amongst the masses. But the wealthy business interests and clever family financial structures that feed off the UK, will still not be made to pay even the tiny % they could, that would make such a difference to the mass of ordinary people in the UK. If spent wisely of course. Which is a whole 'nother issue.
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I am not!
I am already happy.
Not worried. Studying…
Apologies Susannah if I misinterpreted where you stand on this. But with the way social policy ends up being implemented in the UK, “enabling” pensioners to downsize will practically turn into “forcing” them to move.
A more widely targeted form of help would be acceptable but any form of “help” whatever its reality will be exploited by the wealthy.
As is often the case now when social services get involved and an old person is in a house rather than a single story home and they can force the issue. Fortunately my mum was in a bungalow and I fully expect our next forever home to also be a bungalow.
I would however move to a smaller place as I approached that end of my life but never into one of those hives they build today. Maybe I just think differently to others not wishing to rattle around a large house.
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Any tax system creates incentives and disincentives. Rhetorical misrepresentations like ‘forcing elderly people to move’ can be matched by any number of similar characterisations of the current UK tax system: eg. not only forcing small children to move, but breaking up their family entirely, forcing them into homelessness, social care, etc…
But using words like ‘forcing’ in this context is just emotive nonsense. The fact is that the current UK tax system, along with lack of social housing, distorts its property market from top to bottom, by incentivising investment in unused property instead of enterprise.
Over 40 years, and counting, this has resulted (along with other unbelievably stupid policies) in a massive movement of wealth from poor to rich, and from young to old, and in fact from the future to the past. This is madness - for everybody, because although the elderly have been gainers up to now, future pensioners will lose too, because the capacity of the young - the active economy - to support them has been undermined.
What’s needed is a simple progressive tax system - taking in both earned and unearned income, that treats people equally instead of actively rewarding them for having more homes or more space. Any issues around ‘forcing elderly people to move’ in the short term are easily dealt with by transition arrangements - common in implementation of tax changes. And in the long term - well, as I said, unless changes like this are made, everybody loses - homes, pensions, everything.
This is also, by the way, the best way to deal with inflation.
I have read many times that your stance on any topic is not to ‘attack’ the individual but better to have a go at the system which sometimes is hard to do but best to try.
My next comment is not personal to you but to a system you describe as wrong over the last 40 years. A system which I strongly suggest has benefitted many of the old timers on SF who now enjoy retirement. It is all too easy to suggest how a system should be tweaked to benefit the future by those who have effectively bankrupt it in the past.
How can the system be improved?
I don’t know and like what I suspect the vast majority of those who have benefited, dont really care.
That’s how life is and always has been, sad perhaps but true.
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Well, with regard to the current discussion of how the UK tax system has played a large part in destroying its housing sector - see my post above:
Or do you mean how can the whole fiscal system - or the whole economic system - be improved?
JohnBoy - I think I noticed a post from you in another thread advocating improvement of the NHS by removal of layers of management (I may have misread it - I was skimming) - but I thought at the time about copying some relevant passages from a book I’m reading now, which you might find interesting. I’ll try to find time to do it and post it here.
No problem. As you can tell, I have an overly optimistic view no real experience of UK social policy. I probably should not have joined this debate in all naivety.
@JohnBoy - see if this is legible:
Scanned Document.pdf (1.1 MB)
It’s from Humankind, by Rutger Bregman - highly recommended.
Yup, misread, not guilty.
Ah well - sorry. The scan is worth a read anyway !
I wonder whose post it was I saw?
Perhaps by chance they’ll find the scan here…