2024 Meeting in Portcullis House

All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Land Value Capture

 

 

The Challenge: How to make Council Tax fairer

 

Monday 4th March 2024

3.00 – 5.00pm

Room T, Portcullis House

Chair: John McDonnell MP

Speakers:

John Muellbauer - Senior Research Fellow Professor of Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford University

Andrew Dixon - founder of ARC InterCapital, founding trustee of The Woodhaven Trust and an Enterprise Fellow at The Prince’s Trust & Founder of Fairer Share

Joe Bourke - Chartered Certified Accountant & Senior Lecturer at the Claude Littner Business School, University of West London

Heather Wetzel – Vice Chair Labour Land Campaign





Invitation:


Come and discuss options on reforming Council Tax to make it fairer for homeowners and tenants all over the UK.  Speakers will be offering different opportunities to fundamentally tackle the unfairness of the current Council Tax system whereby someone living in a modest home in low property value areas pay the same amount of Council Tax as someone living in a multi-million pound mansion in high land value Central London.


The APPG on Land Value Capture recognises that every home has two elements to its value – the value of the building and the value of the land the home is located on. This discussion will focus on capturing land value to make the system more just. Land is provided free by nature with no cost of production and its economic value only arises from society’s demand to use it for homes, businesses, food production, public services, leisure etc.


If you think that Council Tax is not fit for purpose, please come and join the debate so we can work together to have a fairer tax on residential homes that takes account of land value.



The Challenge

Are we taxing the right sort of incomes?

Is there a fundamental flaw with the UK’s economy that distorts public and private investments and which underpins inequality – individual and regional?

Is there an innovative economic policy which all political parties could adopt to achieve their aims?

How can any government make our tax system fairer and unavoidable whilst tackling social and environmental ills that damage society?



The role of land and land wealth in our economy is often overlooked. Yet access to and the cost of land affects every aspect of our economy. Whilst this APPG focuses on land, the same arguments apply to all natural resources including, oil, gas, minerals, the spectrum, rivers and oceans, wind, solar energy, water etc.

Land is a gift of nature without any cost of production; land value and therefore land wealth only arises from our combined demand to use it for homes, businesses, food production, leisure, public services, transport, etc.


The APPG for Land Value Capture examines how land values arise, where land wealth is directed and the arguments to recapture at least a part of land wealth to reduce and/or replace taxes which distort our economy and which are too easily avoided.


The Office of National Statistics tells us that in “2020 land was the most valuable asset in the economy, estimated at £6.3 trillion, accounting for nearly 60% of the UK's net worth.”



For more information about our aims or to hear about our work, please get in touch with us:

Chair: John McDonnell MP

Contact: Joe Bourke j.bourke@bourkeaccountants.com  (Secretariat for APPG for Land Value Capture, Coalition for Economic Justice www.c4ej.com)


Just some of the Environmental. Social and Economic benefits of shifting from distortive and avoidable/evadable taxes to an annual levy on the value of land:


Environmental benefits:


Social benefits:


Economic benefits