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As a northerner :) I would endorse the national LVT idea.

I see no reason to couple this at all to the local taxation question. Income and land taxes nationally, with local authorities able to vary either or both.

Not personally a big fan of LIT, but I can see the arguments for not backing down.

Actually, I think you over-egg it a little Jock. Promoting the most cost-efficient use of land consistent with the permission is likely to mean less ecologically efficient uses are adopted.

But anyway, this can be corrected elsewhere and LVT is still a good idea for the other reasons you give.

Gavin, in answer to your first - it's not so much a drop of a hat" - people actually move about quite a deal nowadays. Whilst 50% of the owner occupancy sector is unmortgaged and therefore you would think pretty stable, the other 50% the average mortgage lasts just eight years - so there is clearly some churn. But business is the key - if there was a 50% saving on your tax bill if you moved from "Silicon" Thames Valley to Silicon Glen you would take a fair amount of economic activity with you.

On your other questions:
- Who would value the land?

Land is already valued - accurately enough for people to judge whether their "single biggest investment" is a good buy or not. We already have vast amounts of data on land and property transactions and the completion of the National Land and Property Gazetteer project will make that easier to apply. I don't see a problem, once people are used to it. It was a problem in Hong Kong - who were able to have a low income tax regime because they have LVT but it often went decades between revaluations so they tended to mess instead with rates.

- If all other taxes are unfair, would it not be sensible, in your opinion, to replace all taxes with a LVT?

Indeed, Henry George called it the "Single Tax". Adam Smith the best species of revenue to tax and so on. However it should be noted that a. it would not preclude taxes - so called sin taxes - that attempt to change habits where those are democratically agreed aims and b. that "land" in this context is a classical understdnaing of land as "all of the material universe not created by application of man and capital" so, for example, could income airport landing slots, definitely includes licenses to lease parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and so on. But yes, I can find few if any redeeming features of income tax, for example. But LVT is definitely intended as a replacement not additional tax.

- Would landlords or tenants be required to pay the tax? If landlords you could instantly destroy the rental market which is necessary to the economy and is fair use of an individual's money.

*Owners* are usually the ones who would pay it. So landlords in the main (especially since it would be driven off the land register). If a tenant was already paying a full market rent it would not be easy to pass it on, since they are effectively already paying (to the landlord) that portion of the rent that is the taxable economic rent. But I don't believe you would destroy the private rented sector, though I do believe it would reduce as the whole thing would encourage ownership over renting. Yields to the owners of all land would fall as a portion of those yields is paid in tax - so it would certainly cause an adjustment in the short term (which might be no bad thing - get rid of the slum landlords mainly who have no interest in looking after their properties properly - such people are living off the unearned economic rent of what they own anyway largely - and incentivise those who do keep their property well and up to date and "worth renting".

There are suggestions - such as a homestead allowance - about ways in which landlords could be given an incentive to do creative things like share ownership. But you are right overall - it is an attack on landlordism - which is presumably why their lordships were so shit scared of it in 1909!"

I think there is generally a political cost to any new tax because fear is more powerful than hope.

To overcome this, we have to be clear that it is not a money-raising measure, but that other taxes are cut in a fair way. The problem is that we have sold the Income Tax is fair" message hard. In fact the only recent time without a property tax, however crude, was that of the poll tax. And that tax package was so unfair it did permanent damage to the Tories."

I'm guessing actually that what Anonymous might be referring to are the technicalities (tactical issues) of introducing LVT that look like political suicide" where people get the impression, though I cannot work out from where, that everyone who owns their own home will instantly be bankrupted, plunged into negative equity and evicted by the imposition of LVT.

Which is of course utter nonsense. Of course there will be winners and losers (as we were only too willing to explain with LIT) but there are several ways of getting over transitional "hurdles" depending on how radical we want to be - from imposing a tax that would simply restrain future land value growth to something closer to inflation until all danger of negative equity were out of the way before imposing a higher tax that would begin to actually reduce capital values, to going the whole hog, taxing all land value and doling out free money to those who lose out with which to repay their negatively equitied mortgages.

Bonkers, I know. But there we are. We have a Tax Commission going on with the supposed experts supporting LVT who look as if they are going to be outgunned by the campaigns department and local government team which will create a "face saving" policy rather than the best policy.

That's the point at which I give up with this party I fear. If we cannot as a party move away from focus group policies, we might as well choose our least worst enemy and merge with Labour, the Tories or both."

Perhaps one of the reasons why LVT isn't exactly flavour of the month is the woeful shortage of any *political*, let alone *tactical* messages from its proponents.

All your arguments sound lovely at the top-level, in terms of economic & political theory, but whenever Tony Vickers or whoever presents a paper on what it would mean in practice, it looks like political suicide.

No wonder the Tax Commission members are (allegedly) sceptical ...

See, I just don't understand this line. We offer the prospect of a low tax economy, in which most equalization is achieved by market forces rather than the big state, the only long term solution to housing affordability, less intrusiveness than will be required to maintain incomes and transaction as tax bases in a globalized world, a tax that is controllable by the payer (the very definition of a liberal tax as I read somewhere recently - Nick Clegg perhaps?), a better way of financing public infrastructure that pays for itself out of the windfall gains such projects create in local land markets (and automatically compensating people in lower taxes if they are adversely affected by such projects).

Actually I hear the TC is not so skeptical - that LVT has had majority of support for most of the time it's been meeting (not for replacing LIT but usually as a national tax) - just that the campaigns team and the local government teams are dead against any form of property tax because of the mixed messages it will send about the LIT campaign.

I rather suspect that for Tony as well as myself, LVT is a bigger issue than party. If we do not grasp it now I shall probably be off as soon as I can find a different more receptive political home.

I say it's the political suicide of a mediocre third party that dares not step too far out of the two party consensus line if we don't look seriously at it.

Unfortunately, every time I've heard any high level discussion on LIT/LVT, the thrust of it is we said we wouldn't u-turn on LIT and we can't afford to lose face." To date I haven't heard a single economic argument for LIT, just some old tosh about "fairness".

I fear the worst. :("