Summer Budget 2015 – Landlords Reactions

The Spending Plan
Summary of the TaxPayers’ Alliance plan to reduce spending

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/taxpayersalliance/pages/5255/attachments/original/1425976121/Executive

Second, people and businesses like to know what’s going to happen in the future; it means they can plan for the long term. This can’t happen if our country has a reputation for semi-randomly levying taxes on a small subset of the population that are in the bad-books at any one time.
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/the_debt_and_deficithttp://www.taxpayersalliance.com/the_debt_and_deficit

Reply to the comment left by “KATHY MILLER” at “26/10/2015 – 14:27“:

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y. As 3.5 million jobs were created since 2000, out-of-work welfare
claimant rolls stayed about the same. UK welfare claimants were not moving into
work as jobs were created. Two-thirds of the jobs created were taken by immigrants
prepared to work hard rather than rely on benefits.

1.2. Pension reform
Spending on pensions has risen inexorably with an ageing population. Adjusted
for inflation, spending on the state pension and pension credit has doubled since
1996 and is approaching £100 billion a year. When it was introduced in 1908, the
state pension age was 70 and average life expectancies were much lower. Even when
lowered to 65 in 1925, most people could not expect to live long enough to claim a
Attitudes towards
welfare dependency
have hugely hardened
over the last ten
years: 57 per cent
of the public now
believe that benefits
are too high and
discourage work
22 Chapter one | Fiscal churn should be minimised
pension. By contrast, life expectancy is now high and rising rapidly. Not only are we
living longer, but thanks to better diets, healthcare and technology, people are much
more likely to be able to work at a given age.
The scale of spending commitments for pensioners means that no government
serious about getting a grip on spending can afford to ignore pension reform.
Therefore pensions should be reformed with a view to reducing the burden on
taxpayers by raising the state pension age faster and cutting back on unaffordable
promises of increases.
Policy 1: freeze the basic state pension and minimum income guarantee
in 2016–17, then uprate with CPI
Spending on the state pension and pension credit has become unaffordable. The
“triple lock” promise – that pensions will always rise by whichever is higher out of
inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent – made by the Conservatives before the
2010 election was irresponsibly profligate. It is doubly so to keep it now as spending
is forecast to rise from £93 billion to £108 billion in 2019–20. Instead, the next
government should ditch the policy and freeze pensions in 2016–17. Thereafter, they
should increase them in line with inflation. This would save £10 billion by 2020–21,
part of our programme to bring spending down to 31.7 per cent of GDP.
As part of our list of savings to meet the current government’s aim of reducing
spending to 35.2 per cent of GDP by 2019–20, we also assessed a less prudent policy.
This would scrap the triple lock and increase pensions by inflation but not freeze
them in 2016–17. We estimate that this would save around £6.8 billion.

But if the housing cost crisis is to be solved, this is a side
issue. According to the DCLG,50 there is only enough developable brownfield
land for just over 1.5 million homes. That should be seen as an upper limit,
because it assumes away all competing potential uses for that land. And
much of this land would be too expensive to make suitable for residential
development because it is contaminated with levels of pollution that exceed
minimum safety standards. Those brownfield site opportunities which loom
so large in the campaign materials of anti-development protesters are simply
not there.
3. Planning constraints that are initially harmless may develop more of a
“bite” over time, while attitudes to development could also harden over
time, and those attitudes could be endogenous rather than exogenous.
Privileges that have been around for long enough often come to be seen
as “rights”, and this entitlement mentality is apparent in the campaign
materials of British nimby organisations. Organised beneficiaries of
planning restrictions clearly do believe that they have a “right” to block
development and disregard the housing needs of other people, and the
planning system may itself have contributed to fostering that mentality.
Treating attitudes as endogenous has important policy implication

But if the housing cost crisis is to be solved, this is a side
issue. According to the DCLG,50 there is only enough developable brownfield
land for just over 1.5 million homes. That should be seen as an upper limit,
because it assumes away all competing potential uses for that land. And
much of this land would be too expensive to make suitable for residential
development because it is contaminated with levels of pollution that exceed
minimum safety standards. Those brownfield site opportunities which loom
so large in the campaign materials of anti-development protesters are simply
not there.
3. Planning constraints that are initially harmless may develop more of a
“bite” over time, while attitudes to development could also harden over
time, and those attitudes could be endogenous rather than exogenous.
Privileges that have been around for long enough often come to be seen
as “rights”, and this entitlement mentality is apparent in the campaign
materials of British nimby organisations. Organised beneficiaries of
planning restrictions clearly do believe that they have a “right” to block
development and disregard the housing needs of other people, and the
planning system may itself have contributed to fostering that mentality.
Treating attitudes as endogenous has important policy implication

e. The severity of the housing crisis has done
nothing to mellow the resistance of nimby organisations against development; if
anything, those groups have become more defensive and more hysterical. Places
where development is envisaged are now routinely described as “under threat” or
“under siege”. Places are not simply “changed” by development, they are “desecrated”,
“ruined”, “destroyed” or “disfigured”.

4. Housing-related expenditure should be devolved to the local level.
Housing benefit and social housing subsidies should be paid from locally
raised taxes. In places which fail to provide a sufficient supply of
housing, taxes would have to be higher than elsewhere, because more
people would require financial assistance with housing costs. Conversely,
making housing affordable by allowing high levels of development
would become an easy way for local authorities to cut expenditure. This
point should not be underestimated. The annual cost of housing benefit
amounts to over £900 per household.59 Places which adopt sensible planning
policies could bring that cost down to almost zero, and could cut
their local tax bills accordingly. In places where housing policy continues
to be dictated by nimbys, residents would ask themselves whether the
preservation of every field on the edge of town really justifies a substantially
higher tax bill.

policy, which is probably best illustrated by the following episode:
In 2013, Sir Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, was commenting on
the housing problems of younger people from rural areas, who were unable to find
accommodation in proximity to their families. Jenkins argued that unmet housing
need in such areas was not a reason to build houses: “Are you going to say that people
who have lived in the Windrush Valley [in the Cotswolds] for 100 years have a
right to go on living there? No, I’m afraid they don’t. Sorry.”61 His remarks provoked
a backlash of angry comments in papers like the Daily Mail. The anger was surprising,
because Jenkins had said nothing new. He had merely restated his well-known
position against housing development which he had stated countless times before.62
So what explained the backlash?
Jenkins had violated an unspoken rule of British the housing debate: He had spelt
out the implications of his anti-development position. The unspoken rule is that one
must never admit that high house prices are driven by a refusal to permit sufficient
levels of housing development. It is this “doublethink” which allows people to be
outraged about high house prices, while also being outraged about a proposed housing
development nearby. It allows politicians to profess themselves outraged about the
“scandal” of rising house prices in their constituency, while also having their picture
taken with a local “protect our green belt” or “no to over-development” campaign.
If housing policy is to make any progress, this is the attitude that has to change.

Tax havens are often criticised for facilitating money-laundering and crime; but
there is a moral case for low-tax jurisdictions too. In the first place, the finance that
they attract may be the only viable livelihood in places that are otherwise largely barren:
choking off that finance may cause real hardship. And low-tax jurisdictions have
another beneficial effect: their existence reduces the ability of governments in other
countries to impose unjustly onerous taxes on their own populations, with all of the
economic and moral downside this implies