Property tax

Reform Scotland’s Land

Stephen Richard — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 09:05:16 +0000

Reform Scotland’s Land

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Tue, 09/14/2021 - 10:05

Alternative Published Date

2020

A new housing settlement

Stephen Richard — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:54:06 +0000

A new housing settlement

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Tue, 09/14/2021 - 09:54

Alternative Published Date

2020

Category

Housing

Type of Resource

Policy Paper

Fast Facts

There is so much wrong with our housing system, from needless homelessness to spiralling costs (which have shut a generation out of housing) to over-mortgaged homeowners struggling financially to the sheer environmental inefficiency of much of the housing we build to the failure to build homes how and where communities need rather than where a developer can make most money.

More details

It is almost politically impossible these days to say that we must control house price inflation – but we absolutely must control house price inflation. The best way to do this is to give people a high-quality, affordable alternative to the private market which is fuelling the rising house prices. Rather than seeing public rental housing as a solution to the ‘problem’ of people who can’t get on the housing ladder or a response to poverty we should see it as a positive choice for people to make. If we developed desirable new sites as public rental housing and built those houses to the highest quality and made them available for social rent, just as in many other European countries young people and families would chose to live in them because its the best option for them and not only because it is the only option.

Common Weal has produced an economic model for how to do this called Good Houses for All. First, we need to use Land Value Capture (explained in this report ) so that the public can buy land at its value pre-planning permission (which after all is a right granted by the public in the public interest). Then by using long term patient finance supplied by the Scottish National Investment Bank it is possible to build houses to the very highest environmental standard without requiring any public subsidy. That means that the number of houses that could be built would be limited only by how many people wanted them. And rents would be slashed – the average two-bedroom house currently costs about £1,400 to rent, heat and maintain each month and yet these new, higher, quality ones would cost only a little over £800 a month. This could represent a revolution in Scotland’s housing system.

But there are other, more direct ways to impact on house prices. The existing Council Tax is grossly unfair, with people living in the least expensive houses paying something like five or six times as much tax proportionately as those living in the most expensive houses. Replacing this tax with one that taxed houses fairly based on their real value would mean that people who have benefited from rising house prices would pay their fair share. That’s why we propose a Property Tax to replace the Council Tax and to dampen down house price inflation.

In the Common Home Plan (our Green New Deal which you can read here) we explain how Scotland can improve the housing it has, bringing it up to the highest possible environmental standards without the homeowner having to pay. By replacing heating systems and properly retrofitting houses with insulation (which will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming report), borrowing to fund it over a long period, connecting it to a proper industrial strategy so the supply chains for this are captured and by doing it all collectively as part of a Green New Deal we can generate more new public income than the work itself costs.

We have also published two visions for the kind of housing system Scotland should aspire to – House Keeping Scotland and the more economically-focussed Housing for a Better Nation. They cover everything from why we should repair rather than knock down existing buildings to why we should build our new buildings primarily from Scottish timber.

And as explained in our Big Idea on protecting tenants, we have also set out details of why Scotland needs rent controls, why the ones we have don’t work and what it would look like if they were done properly.

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/big-ideas/a-new-housing-settlement/

Keywords

Language English

Resilient Scotland Part Two

Stephen Richard — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 10:58:51 +0000

Resilient Scotland Part Two

Primary Author or Creator

Common Weal

Stephen Richard Sat, 09/04/2021 - 11:58

Date Published

Sun, 06/21/2020 - 12:00

Category

Economy

Type of Resource

Policy Paper

Fast Facts

This phase of creating a resilient Scotland covers 2021-26 the five years of the next Scottish Parliament. It provides the detail of how the transformation envisaged can be achieved quickly, with a closer look at our economy, society and democracy.

More details

This is the second part of a three-part plan for creating greater economic, social and environmental resilience in Scotland and focusses on the four- year period of the next Scottish Parliament. It contains too many individual recommendations to summarise all of them here. At the same time it does not cover a number of areas which require much more space to cover than is possible here – not least the need for a National Care System (which will be covered in a forthcoming Common Weal report). These are some of the key points:

Over this period Scotland should accelerate economic transformation by creating an industrial strategy for green reindustrialisation in Scotland, using the full set of policy tools available in Scotland to support green manufacturing and other forms of production.

This will not only create high-pay jobs and increase national prosperity,
it will also transform Scotland into a ‘circular economy’ in which our economic activity does not do damage to our environment – or to anyone else’s environment either.

To make this happen will require extensive public interventions in banking, infrastructure, energy, food, transport and training and organisational development, each designed to create the best possible condition for the transition to take place and to lead to the creation of new high-quality jobs as quickly as possible.

A National Pharmaceutical Company should be set up to provide Scotland’s NHS with inexpensive medicines and to act as a manufacturing hub more generally, producing high-quality medical equipment in Scotland – including PPE.

The Council Tax should be replaced with a fairer Property Tax which also taxes land, to finance local development and to incentivise the productive use of land

Scotland should undergo major democratic reform, particularly to introduce a dynamic system of local democracy, but also to move Scotland into a transformational new phase of participatory democracy. This should be accompanied by a much stronger commitment to a system of transparency and accountability and new ways of making policy.

This decentralisation will enable a much greater focus on both localism and ‘placemaking’. The Plan proposes specific action programmes for town regeneration and for a rural and coastal industrial strategy based around green reindustrialisation. This will involve major reform of the fishing industry in Scotland to bring jobs back to Scottish communities.

To enable all of this Scotland will need a radical programme of land reform to provide adequate access to essential natural resources which provide the basis for much of what is in this Plan.

The Plan then focusses on how to improve social and community cohesion, democratic and social participation and how to ensure that the sense of civic duty which was so evident during the Covid crisis is embedded into public life.

This will need a much greater focus on what really creates wellbeing, not least the need to move away from GDP as the primary measure of economic success and the wellbeing benefits of deconsumerisation.

This phase of the Plan also acts as an ‘incubator phase’ of a full Green New Deal. Much can be done under devolution and this is all covered in this report, but crucial things are not possible with the power of independence. The three big ones – decarbonising heating, electricity and transport – cannot be achieved under devolution. However, each of these involves large engineering projects which have a long lead time of three or four years. It is perfectly within the powers of devolution to get these projects shovel-ready.

However, this will represent the limits of what is possible in Scotland under devolution. At this point Common Weal believes that Scotland must choose either to continue on this economic and social path or to revert to following the economic and environmental strategy being pursued at a UK level. For this reason a detailed proposal for how Scottish independence will be achieved will be prepared and this will be put to the people of Scotland not later than year three of this Parliament. Those who support the objectives of this Plan but do not support independence will be encouraged to explain what steps they believe can then be taken.

Resource Address (URL)

https://commonweal.scot/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Resilient-Scotland-Part-Two…

Keywords

Green reindustrialisation

circular economy

Property tax