There seems to be an unhealthy obsession on the political Left with treating property ownership as something to be punished rather than encouraged.
Here in Powys, the council wants to impose a staggering 300 per cent council tax premium on long-term empty homes.
Yet an unoccupied property places far less demand on local services.
It has no children using local schools, generates little or no household waste, makes minimal use of roads, libraries or other council facilities, and often requires fewer day-to-day services than an occupied home.
Why, then, should owners be treated as little more than cash cows?
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The same hostility to property ownership is increasingly evident at Westminster.
Labour has already expanded inheritance tax to catch more estates, and there are growing calls for further taxes on housing and land, including proposals for a land value tax and other wealth levies. Families who have worked, saved and paid tax throughout their lives are now expected to keep paying simply because they own a home.
Supporters of a land value tax claim it is fair and efficient, but the reality is far more complicated.
Britain already has some of the highest property taxes in the developed world through council tax, stamp duty and inheritance tax.
A land tax would almost certainly become an additional burden rather than replacing existing ones.
It would hit homeowners, farmers, small businesses and pensioners alike, while requiring a huge new bureaucracy to value every parcel of land separately from the buildings standing on it.
Given Britain’s notoriously slow and inconsistent planning system, determining the value of land would become a legal and administrative nightmare, with endless appeals and disputes.
Property ownership has long been a cornerstone of aspiration in Britain.
Instead of encouraging people to buy a home, improve it and pass it on to their children, governments increasingly seem determined to tax it at every stage: when you buy it, while you own it, when you improve it, and even after you die.
Surely the role of government should be to reward hard work, saving and investment, not to wage an ideological war against those who have done exactly that.
Roman Jones
Welshpool
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