Helen Crane

Is this going to be a tax that just hangs around for years and more and more people get kind of sucked into it and the rate never goes up?

There's no guarantee that any future government would scrap it.

It seems to me like the kind of tax that could just quietly go on for a long time because no one really wants to complain too much about a tax that's for people who own two million pound homes.

And it seems like one they could just really quietly sit on

for years and years.

I don't know, I think more people should be interested in it than just people who have a house worth that amount, because I just think it's a bit insidious, really.

I mean, it feels like there's loads of things out there at the minute that could be called a wealth tax, doesn't it?

But this is the latest one.

So this is Wes Streeting's idea.

And he does seem a bit half-baked, if I'm honest.

At the basic level, it seems like he wants to equalise capital gains tax with income tax.

So...

The minute if you sell second home or sell shares and make a gain, you pay 24% tax on that above £3,000 a year.

So he wants to bring that up to the same amount that people would pay on their income.

So 20% if you're a basic rate taxpayer, 40% if you're a higher rate taxpayer and 45% if you're an additional rate taxpayer.

On paper, maybe that seems like a sensible idea to some, but how much of that gain is down to inflation?

I think it needs to be adjusted depending on how long you've owned the asset, how the assets have grown in value.

Otherwise, it just seems quite mad.

Yeah, this is another slightly crazy thing that seems to have come out from the government this week.

These aren't sort of confirmed reports, but apparently this is something that's been suggested by Rachel Reeves and she's basically saying...