Comments (10)
What makes a mansion? I put up a list last time the mansion tax was being talked about. But for amusement’s sake, here is another compiled by an irritated London house-owning friend.
You can see why the whole thing makes Londoners so furious. But the list also does a good job of proving the point that you don’t pay much for houses, but you do pay (or not) for the location of houses.
Mansions in London owned by rich, evil capitalists who don’t pay enough tax and need to be dealt with accordingly:
• Property one
• Property two
• Property three
• Property four
• Property five
• Property six
Perfectly average homes in the rest of the UK owned by ordinary people who shouldn’t be taxed any more than they are already:
• Property one
• Property two (an old favourite, still on the market!)
• Property three
• Property four
• Property five
• Property six
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1. Shinsei1967
(19 February 2013, 05:13PM)
Complain about this commentMust say I really don’t have a problem with a 5 bed house in Fulham being the same price as a stately home in Scotland.
The house in Fulham might need repainting and windows repaired every 10 years. What’s that ? £25k. The place in Scotland will need a new roof at £250,000.
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2. Paralytic
(19 February 2013, 06:02PM)
Complain about this commentShinsei1967, I think you’re slightly missing the point. Presumably in the minds of its Labour and Lib-Dem idiot progenitors, a Mansion Tax is required to target rich people and make them pay more tax. That’s what Miliband and Cable are always saying. But people who can afford to maintain chunky houses in the styx are very often going to be much richer than someone with a four bedroom house in North Kensington. So the ‘Mansion Tax’ isn’t a tax on rich people at all – it’s just a tax on people who live in the wrong place (i.e. the nicer and often Tory voting parts of London).
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3. Boris MacDonut
(19 February 2013, 06:19PM)
Complain about this commentThe meeja call this a mansion tax. Everyone else calls it a levy on expensive homes. Merryn answers her own question in her earlier post . Almost 70% of property over £2 million was bought by the “foreign billionaires seeking to hedge there income” by owning empty London trophy flats. That is what is targetted, belatedly and at too low a level.
#1 Shinsei is right again. -
4. Wandsworth dweller
(19 February 2013, 06:29PM)
Complain about this commentA tax on the value of a house had nothing to do with the ability of the person to pay! In my street there are quite a lot of retirees who have lived here for 30 or more years. Their houses are now worth more than £2m but their pension is fixed. In my own case, I bought 15 years ago and have been out of work for sometime but making ends meet through my wife’s teaching salary. not sure where I would get the money from to pay a mansion tax. It seems to me that it is a little like charging capital gains tax before I have actually realised a gain! Why not charge a tax on people who have more than £x invested in shares, at least they are liquid and can be sold to pay the tax! Totally unfair and iniquitous tax which appeals to those who think they will not affected by it.
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5. Shinsei1967
(19 February 2013, 06:38PM)
Complain about this commentParalytic
“I think you’re slightly missing the point.”
I don’t think so. Merryn’s intention seems to be to show that many £2m mansions don’t look like mansions in the popular understanding of the term.
Most people think a mansion looks like a stately home and not a 2 bed maisonette in Knightsbridge.
But as Boris correctly points out calling it a Mansion Tax is inaccurate. It is a tax on properties over £2m. Most properties over £2m in the UK aren’t 12 bedroom Grade II listed Georgian piles with 20 acres, a lake and stables.
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6. Wandsworth dweller
(19 February 2013, 07:16PM)
Complain about this comment…..and another thing…At least with raising the rate of stamp duty people know that they will have to pay it and can budget for that when they make the decision to buy a house. A ” mansion tax” is effectively a retrospective tax as it hits people for a decision they made in the past. I just think this is the most unfair of taxes, much more unfair even than inheritance tax which at least does not impact the living!
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7. Paralytic
(19 February 2013, 07:25PM)
Complain about this commentBoris MacDonut: you don’t provide a source for your data, but even if it’s the case that 70% of properties worth over £2m been bought by foreigners recently, that wouldn’t change the fact that liquidity in the property market isn’t that high, so most properties worth over £2m in this country are still in the hands of the natives. So a Mansion Tax would catch large numbers of people like Wandsworth Dweller and his neighbours. Whether or not to extract more from rich foreigners is another topic – but a property tax aimed at non-residents is not what either Labour or the LibDems are proposing.
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8. Paralytic
(19 February 2013, 07:25PM)
Complain about this commentShinsei1967: of course you’re right that ‘Mansion Tax’ is a misnomer. But it is misnomer wholeheartedly embraced by the LibDems and Labour (see Miliband, Clegg and Cable’s speeches on the topic). Their use of the term is part of their populist politics of envy, – they are trying to invoke the image of vast mansions and evil Lord Toad who deserves to be taxed more than the man on the Clapham Omnibus.
The photos of the two types of houses in Merryn’s post seem to demonstrate that rich Lord Toad wouldn’t pay this tax, as his country estate would be exempt, wheresas the quite a few men on the Clapham, Wandsworth or Battersea Omibus would be caught by it. And as such, as Merryn says, it’s not a Mansion Tax, nor a fair version of a wealth tax, but simply a tax on location.
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9. Shinsei1967
(19 February 2013, 07:38PM)
Complain about this commentParalytic
I know quite a few people who have sold up perfectly ordinary looking (albeit pricey) flats/houses in central London and moved out to the countryside and bought (for same money) the sort of places that are advertised in Country Life.
So the besuited bloke leaving a Wandsworth suburb at 7am on a Monday is much the same as the tweed-jacketed bloke standing outside his pillared C18th house in Suffolk on a Sunday morning.
There really isn’t any difference these days between the City Man on the Clapham Omnibus and Mr Toad in Toad Hall.
Apart from the fact that Mr Toad in Toad Hall gets up at 5am to catch the 6.15 to Liverpool St.
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10. Boris MacDonut
(19 February 2013, 07:48PM)
Complain about this comment#7Paralytic. The stats came from a Lloyds TSB study last year. It found 167,000 £1million plus properties in the UK with 67% of them in London and 25% in Kensington alone. It found 6,000 sales in a year. For £10million plus it was 65% foreign buyers and over £25 million it was 90%. Bernie Ecclestone was the only British buyer above £25million £30million. The others were ALL Russian, Ukrainian or Arab including the two biggest sales at £140 million and £136 million respectively. This tax is aimed at getting a few quid out of the oligarchs who abuse our legal system to launder their ill gotten gains.
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