Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But some estate agents have had a go working it out and their estimates cluster around the £100,000 mark.
So, again, let's take the Labour plans as an example and do some politician maths.
Savills, the estate agents, have said that they think there are 40,000 properties worth £2 to £3 million.
So that would raise £120 million, far short of the £1.2 billion thereafter.
So the assumption is that Labour would just adjust the charges for the properties worth over £3 million so they could raise the rest.
And this, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reckons, would mean they'd charge those property owners £19,000 on average.
I mean, it would be more or less depending what band your house was in.
And again, the Lib Dems could do the same for properties worth over £5 million.
It is, isn't it?
Certainly easier than ordering a revaluation of council tax bans, which could turn a lot of voters against you if their bills went up.
And it's easy for Scottish Labour's Jim Murphy to campaign about mansion tax, for example.
I mean, it's estimated there are only 800 properties in Scotland that would attract the mansion tax.
And Jim Murphy says it's a tax that would be levied against people in London and the southeast of England in the main.
Indeed, Boris Johnson has described it as a tax on London.
But actually, it wouldn't even affect many people there.
Although it's true that more than three quarters of the homes that could be caught up in mansion tax are in London, in reality, it's only about 90,000 homes, less than 3% of London properties, many of which will actually be concentrated in just five boroughs where the average house price is more than two thirds of a million.
So, in fact, it would probably be more accurate to call it a tax on Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Islington, Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham.
Of course, it wouldn't be a popular policy with those small number of people it would affect.
I mean, the former singer Mylene Klass has been rather outspoken about this, not because she'd be paying the tax, I'm sure.
She says she's worried about all the grannies, as she puts it, who'd get caught out after living an ordinary life in a modest home in an area of London that just happens to have shot up in value.
Showing 241–260 of 4,250 · page 13 of 213
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