Could Andy Burnham’s proposed land tax force landlords to sell?

Isn’t everyone missing the point which was made on a recent Lease Knowledge Partnership website of a report by an MP that digitisation by HMLR of Titles to Land ownership 30 years ago either does not contain relevant information or this relevant information is hidden.
The report is complex in its examination of what appears to have been digitisation by incompetent government employees.
So the issue is how can there be a tax on land when it’s not clear who owns it?

Reply to the comment left by Kizzie at 08/07/2026 – 20:33
Guess who owns the land, tax them and wait to see if they complain. Standard government tactic.

Land Tax the landlord = rent rise for tenants, fact of life
2% rise in income tax for landlords from April 2027 = rent rise for tenants.
Notably the government has not said if the 2% rise can be claimed against expenses items yet, we will see!!

The Maluku

The point is that the identity of the true owner and other relevant information is not accessible to those for eg pursuing Due Diligence and the public.

Reply to the comment left by Kizzie at 09/07/2026 – 09:21
Point taken, my remark was strictly ‘tongue in cheek’.

Reply to the comment left by Kizzie at 08/07/2026 – 20:33
The proposal is for a tax on property value; but it’s still flawed, because property value isn’t clear either. The only time you really know the value of a property is when you sell it. At every other time a determination of price is highly subjective.

A tax on the acreage of land would be less subjective but would be highly environmentally damaging and would cause a lot of other collateral damage. A tax on the square footage or metreage of residential accommodation under two metres in height and excluding garaging outbuildings, cellars, unconverted lofts etc. to REPLACE Council tax would be less subjective, arguably fairer, but still not necessarily ‘fair’ because the large house might be being provided with essentially the same services as the small house. But if that Council Tax Replacement Tax were to be introduced Council House and Social Housing owners should pay that too, on behalf of their subsidised tenants who may well already be paying far less than market rent for their properties and also have the right to buy their properties at a discount.

But the real problems with all these proposals are that they are essentially an asset-grab under a left-wing government with a majority that collectively only care about who they can tax to pay for benefits. And just as what started out as a Rental Reform Bill, with some reasonable proposals, turned into the Labour Renters Rights Act, with damaging, inflationary consequences because of this left-wing majority, if this government were to do this it would be a disaster. Any new tax will become additional tax at a time when the tax take hasn’t been higher since just after the second world war and when the government has CLAIMED it wants economic growth, but pursues policies that damage growth in the economy.

Andy Burnham hasn’t been elected. He doesn’t have a mandate for this left-wing c**p.

The question of whether a land tax forces sellers is worth grounding in who is already primed to sell regardless. I run GalimAI, where we track UK property-holding companies against public financial and legal signals. Around 40,015 of them are ageing and shrinking at the same time, older directors sitting alongside contracting balance sheets. That cohort tends to exit on life-stage and finances rather than on any single policy, so a tax like this would not so much create the selling pressure as accelerate a wave already building underneath. The real question is what it does to the timing and the discount, not whether the stock eventually moves. Dror, GalimAI