Buy-to-leave

iolanthe07

electoral role

If you're being pedantic, Captain Mainwaring, it is 'electoral roll' - for heaven's sake!

Oliveru

Kez100 wrote: »

Well they should pay 100% council tax for starters!

Actually we should just adopt the US system of a property tax then have some tax cuts elsewhere to balance things out. Infact lets make it a tax on land, which can be a percentage of the land value. At the same time we can scrap the green belt and any stupid laws that prevent people from building houses on their own land.

I've seen many stories in the newspaper where farmers have decided to build a house on their own land but it wasn't given approval for silly reasons. There is one case where a family built their home behind a haystack so it wasn't visible for a while then when the haystack was removed the council saw it and said they were going to knock it down! If that is not a disgusting attempt to control housing supply then I don't know what is, it's no wonder that house prices got so crazy when you have cheap credit/ silly multiples and supply control.

People can argue for and against whether our boom was engineered (personally I believe it was) but one thing is for sure and that is the current regulations as they stand allow land owners to unfairly profiteer out of these booms. And who are the biggest land owners by far in this country? It's the aristocracy ofcourse, it's no different to the royalty and high class of medieval times treating the peasants (us) unfairly. Anyone rememeber the recent government scandal about that rich BTL guy donating money to New Labour? It doesn't get more obvious than that as examples of the real beneficiaries of New Labour policy.

PasturesNew

In some remote coastal areas it has now almost got to the stage where the coastguard emergency services cannot provide a callout service.

Traditionally, the lifeboat would be manned by locals, working and living locally. 24/7 when the shout went out they'd run down to the boat shed, launch the boat and go out to rescue people. Coastguard services with lifeboats aren't there in the building waiting for people to need rescuing.

Because these people cannot afford to live close to the boatyards it's meant there are less and less volunteers who can help out - they need to live within a certain time/distance radius to be on the volunteer list. Lifeboat crews have always relied on new people joining as older ones retired. The older ones are still retiring but the new people aren't joining because they don't meet the criteria for closeness.

It's almost reached crisis point for getting crews together. As more and more people were buying up homes in coastal areas for 2nd homes/holiday homes, and more and more of those are taking to the water, this is a serious issue.

If you go to the coast this weekend and you take your family out on a boat trip and something goes wrong and it starts sinking, you EXPECT there to be a lifeboat out to save you. And maybe it just doesn't have a crew available this weekend so the nearest crew is now 80 miles away.

This was 2 years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/5112616.stm

Captain_Mainwaring_2

iolanthe07 wrote: »

electoral role

If you're being pedantic, Captain Mainwaring, it is 'electoral roll' - for heaven's sake!

In our local baker's it's not.

Gorgeous_George

Well, I'm not sure we stuck to the topic. Nothing unusual there.

I think a simple VAT on rentable value might be the way forward. Set at 5% or thereabouts, the tax would take no account of fancy accounting and loss making BTLs would pay the same as the more profitable ones.

GG