Last week the policy strongly advocated by Henry George of taxing land values hit the front page of the British press. [see here] The Sunday Times [not available online without subscription] ran a column by Marie Woolf entitled “Lib Dems want a land tax on rich.” It suggest the Liberal Deomocrats are planning a new land tax aimed at wealthy landowners. It quotes Vince Cable as saying that Britain needed a proper examination about how a land tax could be made to work adding “Government is going to look at this at some point because the traditional tax base is more and more difficult to apply. Income tax for high earners is becoming difficult to enforce. The traditional tax bases have been eroded and land tax is the one thing you can’t take off to Monaco. Business rates would eb the first thing to look at . There are modest changers you could replace business rates with a tax based on the value of the site; then instead of council tax you could have a property tax based on the underlying value of the land based on an annual basis.” [See here and here for details of how this could be done].
