Rethinking property tax
Kelvin Hopkins, Labour MP for Luton North
Kelvin Hopkins joined the Labour Party in 1958 and has campaigned on
the doorstep for Labour every year since then. He has lived in Luton
since November 1969 and served on Luton Borough Council from 19731976. Kelvin was elected as MP for Luton North in May 1997. He has
been GMB member since 1977 and is a member of the Labour Land
Campaign.
Carol Wilcox, Secretary of the Labour Land Campaign
Carol is a software engineer by profession but holds an economics
degree. During the 1980s she first read about land value taxation and by
good fortune discovered the Labour Land Campaign at the 1996 Labour
Party Conference and embarked on her 'real economics' education.
Please visit the Labour Land Campaign website - www.labourland.org
The case for land value taxation (LVT) is at the heart of morality: the land existed
before human beings and it is our common wealth. The only way it can be fairly
shared is if the user pays to the community an annual fee for exclusive use of a
particular site.
Individual site values vary tremendously depending on the local environment,
particularly that attributable to public investment, and so should the fee. If this had
been the system adopted from the beginning, no one would reasonably own more
land than they could use. We may have achieved the objective of an efficient market:
to allocate a resource to its best use.
What we have instead is concentrated ownership – less than one percent of people
own seventy percent of British land. Large areas are unused or underused, while the
four percent zoned for housing is squeezed. What we also have is a situation where a
decent home for everyone – a basic human need – appears to be a utopian dream.
“Less than one percent of people own seventy percent of British land”
The value of the UK housing stock is pathetically small compared to some of our
European neighbours. The typical living space here is half that of German homes. This
is not surprising. When two-thirds of the price of the average British house is land
value it does not leave much for building and maintaining the structure.
revolutionise.it
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