The soundbites from Angela Rayner this afternoon seem to be based on raising living standards for 'working people'. How is this going to be done?
Aside from the idea of introducing a wealth tax, what avenues exist to shift the tax burden away from the working class to those who are better off? Also, not upsetting those in the Labour Party who don't want to see welfare cuts?
In her first comments since Labour's election defeats, the ex-deputy PM calls for bolder action from the prime minister.
www.bbc.co.uk
Is there a way in which cooperative ownership could deliver a more competitive outcome for workers against bigger business and the march of offshoring and automation?
There's already reasonable tax breaks to convert to Employee Ownership Trusts for owners (generally private owned businesses), the possible issue is the time taken to compleat.
Although that's based on the fact that the business needs to make the profits to buy the owners out whist setting the timetable at a pace which isn't too long that the staff leave before it's finished and isn't too short that it means that the previous owners feel they've not got a good market value.
An alternative tax strategy could be a land value tax. As generally farm land is cheap, and improves in value as there's better nearby infrastructure (roads, railway lines, cities, etc.).
As such, set the tax free value at (say) £15,000 per acre, with anything upto 750 acres (but not averaged, so you can't buy cheap land to offset your tax from an urban area) at this rate being able to be exempt and add 1% for anything above that.
That would mean that a lot of farms wouldn't pay anything, but could be quite costly for people with a lot of land which has buildings on it.
It would mean that land banking of development rights wouldn't be worth doing, as even at the lower end (£300,000 per acre, but can be upto £1 million) that's a tax bill of £2,850 a year (per acre) and so once planning is achieved they will want to get out built.
