This goes hand-in-hand with landbanking as a pract...

2007-07-31T18:04:00.000+01:00

This goes hand-in-hand with landbanking as a practice that should not really be feasible considering we have a supposed housing shortage that the government has promised to fix. We need some kind of disincentive to stop this kind of thing going on. I propose that:

Any land which either A ) has planning permission to be built on or B ) has buildings on it that are unoccupied should face an additional land value tax set at an appropriate rate so that it pretty much doubles the standard costs of council tax which would be paid were it occupied. So for example:

2 bedroom flat, value of 200k, normal council tax is 1000pa. Therefore land value tax should be set at 1% nationally so that the tax payable is 2000pa. Work it in the same way for land-bank, so a development of 100 similar flats attracts a 200,000pa tax. This can also be backdated if the developer later builds according to the planning permission and sells the flats for more than the assumed value at the time, adjusted for house price inflation and so on.

Could this work? Could it be set up as a petition on the 10 downing street website? The government is banging on about a housing shortage at the moment, so I can't see what credible objection they could make to this (or another similar) scheme.

Comments on Unlocking the Potential of Empty Homes: Britain’s Bad Housing

This goes hand-in-hand with landbanking as a pract...