Quick links: NewsBiscuit Home • Chat Room • Writers' Room • Top Ten
Amazing that it's taken as long as it has.
One of the many things they can spend a few £bn on is funding the cost of replacing dangerous cladding - while they pursue the criminally fraudulent cladding suppliers for compensation. Why the Hell should the home buyers pay to fix buildings they bought in good faith?
Why the Hell should the home buyers pay to fix buildings they bought in good faith?
Because you voted in the Tories. We had more spare cash in the 2 and a half years between Grenfell and Covid than we’ll have from proposed internet sales tax receipts. There’s literally no good reason why it wasn’t done then.
It’s amazing how easy it is to convince Tory voters they’ll have jam tomorrow.
You specifically voted in Bill Wiggin, right? Whose contribution to the March 2018 ‘Fire Safety and Cladding Debate’ was to say the safety standards, which were found not to be stringent enough, were too strict “...because BS 8414 is a tough test. It also failed cladding that was non-combustible...”, on the back of a lobbying campaign by Kingspan to sow doubt, using tests rigged by ... err ... Kingspan.
Bill Wiggin, who also said that the cladding at Grenfell Tower was not made by Kingspan, having previously said that Kingspan was not involved in the tragedy in December 2017, this despite the flaming cladding bearing the word ‘Kingspan’ could be clearly seen on images of Grenfell.
An introduction to Kingspan here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingspan_Group
Bill Wiggin? Bill Wiggin, Patron of Kingspan Insulation Community Trust, that Bill Wiggin?
Obviously the natural choice for anyone who really cares about dangerous cladding and bringing those responsible to justice is someone who’s balls deep in it themselves?
http://www.kingspaninsulationcommunitytrust.org/
Ben: we really are missing an effective Press, aren't we?
Titus: Have I missed summat? What is the connection between an online sales tax and the cladding scandal? These are two completely separate issues, each with a long history:
- we've been talking about an online tax for years, because, erm, retail is dying
- the cladding crisis became clear in June 2017 (Grenfell)
Has an online sales tax been proposed as a mechanism for funding the cladding issue? Genuine question.
- we've been talking about an online tax for years, because, erm, retail is dying
Indeed. Which is why I said '-and Not Before time'.
Has an online sales tax been proposed as a mechanism for funding the cladding issue? Genuine question.
Genuine answer: No. It's just one of many things which urgently need £bns of govt. funding. The only difference in this case is that the govt. ought, in due course, to be able to recover some (but probly not much - they'll just file for bankruptcy) of this money from the criminally fraudulent cladding suppliers.
is Titus the owner and landlord of flats that are clad in something and are now valued at £0?
No. None of the properties I own are affected. But that doesn't stop me from being sorry for home-owners (not so much landlords - they're in business & their own homes are not at risk).
These home-owners have been screwed by crooks, yet they are expected to pay for the rectification. At present they can't even continue to live in their own homes without massive extra fire-watch patrol & insurance costs, and they can't sell their homes either. That sounds like a nightmare. Tenants don't have their life savings invested and can at least move somewhere else.
I remain confused.
Ben: did Titus vote for Bill Wiggin? He's MP for N. Herefords, so it seems possible. As a rule of thumb I don't know who people have voted for
Titus: Why join these two particular dots together? We don't have hypothecated taxation - it all goes into a big bucket and untrustworthy people decide where to spend it. Are you on the waccy baccy?
... did Titus vote for Bill Wiggin?
Not my constituency.
Why join these two particular dots together? We don't have hypothecated taxation - it all goes into a big bucket and untrustworthy people decide where to spend it
You have just answered your own question! I did not link the two issues. I supported a new form of taxation. I also identified 'One of the many things they can spend a few £bn on.'
As you correctly pointed out, we do not have hypothecated taxation. In what way are you suggesting I 'linked' the two issues?
In what way are you suggesting I 'linked' the two issues?
Well, the headline was about an online sales tax and the body was about cladding.
Given that there's a vast number of possible revenue sources for Government, and an equally vast range of things they could spend it on, naming just 1 of each links them by default.
I'd agree with NA - we don't need to wait for some hypothetical future tax, HMG should have dealt with this in 2017. There will be a commercial and legal bunfight, so the logical approach is for HMG to underwrite it all and help to sort out the mess. As a taxpayer I don't want to subsidise dodgy developers, but I accept that some indirect subsidy might take place in order to do the right thing by people living in these properties - whether homeowners or tenants.
Al - I don't think those are hypothecated taxes. For example, the money we all pay in NI has no relationship to how much gets spent on the NHS and pensions. How consistently you have paid will have a bearing on how much pension you as an individual are entitled to, so there's a bit of a link there, but in reality it's treated as a massive pot and it all swirls around with VAT, income tax etc. TV licence is the only exception to that rule - AFAIK there's a direct relationship between TV Licence receipts and the BBC budget. As for the others - they're just taxes, like fuel duty, alcohol duty etc - they go up or down by political whim and the relevant departmental budgets also go up or down by political whim - what we pay against a particular heading is decoupled from what HMG spends on that area.
Er - National Insurance Contributions, Road Fund Licence, TV Licence, Landfill Tax.
Exactly! Despite the cosmetic names given to these various forms of taxation, there is no particular relationship between the money which each of them raises and the area where the money is actually spent. This perhaps why, for instance, 'Road Fund Tax' was eventually re-named 'Vehicle Excise Duty'.
Why should online sellers pay more tax than retail in stores?
Retail stores aren't a public utility, they're a commercial for-profit business. If their business isn't as profitable as the competition then they can either live with giving slightly less money to their shareholders each year or they can change their business model to make it more profitable.
Taxing profitable businesses to prevent them taking profit from older businesses doesn't seem very market-friendly to me.
70% of retail stores that exist now won't exist in 20 years. That's a fact. This proposal would simply be taxing the automobile industry to protect the horse & cart industry.
Also... Everyone thinks of this as a way to get evil Amazon to pay more tax (and I agree they should), BUT this won't work this way. This rule will just punish the hundreds and thousands of small online retailers who are already struggling with extra paperwork and costs due to the Brexit disaster.
So no. No new online tax. Instead there needs to be a way to ensure that profits made from UK customers can't so easily be whisked off to offshore entities by huge international corporations without paying their fair share of tax - and that goes for every type of business, not just online.
Don't forget the only people who would lose out on this are us, the customers, who would end up paying higher prices for products both online AND in stores because online would have to raise their prices to cover the new tax and stores would raise their prices to match because they'd be stupid not to.
Hi Dec,
I get what you are saying but NIC has to go on healthcare. Landfill Tax was most definitely a hypothecated tax, as all the receipts went to Landfill Trusts to spend on benefits for the environment and communities affected by the landfills in their designated geographical area.
The power of discussion.
A good point well made by BJ
His argument makes good sense.
We don't need new laws.
We need to implement the laws that already exist.
As he points out....penalising ALL online sellers does not make sense.
It's a bit like those huge trawlers out at sea that gobble up everything in their path
The bycatch gets thrown back in and dies.
Hi AL - are you sure about NI? My understanding is that the money just goes into the big bucket. The NHS costs way more than NI generates
Bonjo - the challenge here is to achieve the tax revenues we're looking for. I'd agree that we shouldn't let corporations walk all over us - the answer to that surely lies in a simpler tax system, one which we can all understand and therefore turn into a factor when companies are trying to gain our votes.
At least with an online sales tax the mechanism is straightforward, though I take your point about small etailers.
Why should gov't support bricks & mortar businesses? 2 reasons spring to mind:
1. Quality of life for people who live here
2. Reduces the export of jobs, at least to some degree
I'd go even further. I'd zero rate any service which can only be done in person - building, hairdressing, prostitution - but have high rates of VAT on products (which may well be imported)
I'm undecided about an online retail tax
The advantages of using Amazon are (1) price, (2) convenience - assuming you can wait at home all day
Bonjo, you've made some great points there. However, if you want Amazon (for example) to pay more tax, then they'll simply pass this on to their associated small businesses and customers - which is one of the points you said you don't want
Amazon is just the largest online retailer. There are numerous smaller independent retailers that may or may not also be affected by any taxation scheme
It's sort-of the same problem as with online music & entertainment replacing CDs, DVDs, vinyl & phonographs - the whole sector needs to be looked at to see which facets are taxable & which are not. There needs to be ways to prevent crazy untaxed profits, to protect small business, to offer a fair marketplace to online & traditional retail (I'm certainly not defending TESCO here!) - this needs to be achieved internationally, of course
@Bobjonelson, I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but I believe traditional High Street retailers are encumbered with expensive business rates for their shop fronts which puts them at a disadvantage. So an online tax could help redress the balance somewhat. Most people probably don’t want to see a world where the High Street is gone and replaced by Amazon.
If anything Titus says is to be believed, he lives a short walk away from the Wobbly Brewery, which is just inside Hereford/South Hereford, but a short walk away from my old stomping ground of North Hereford; pretty sure he said he’d vote conservative, so it just occurred to me that voting for the Trust Patron of the company he wants justice on is exactly what he’d do, and he didn’t initially deny it. But if we believe him that he didn’t vote for Bill Wiggin, maybe he voted for Hereford/South Hereford’s Jesse Norman to get justice for those affected by unsafe cladding...
Jesse Norman, Jesse Norman who voted against the recommendations from the Grenfell inquiry being legislated for in the Fire Safety Bill which would have forced flat owners and managers to disclose the materials and design of external walls?
Jesse Norman, landlord MP who, in 2016, when he held the Government’s Construction Brief, voted against the Labour amendment to the Housing and Planning Act aimed at private landlords because it ... “would have created unnecessary regulation and cost” and “local authorities already have strong and effective powers to deal with poor quality and unsafe accommodation, and we expect them to use them.”
Even though in March 2019, it emerged that central government provisions for local councils to take charge of privately owned buildings to ensure safe cladding were failing in approximately 90% of cases, because they didn’t have strong effective powers to deal with poor quality and unsafe accommodation, leaving tens of thousands of households stuck in buildings with unsafe cladding?
Jesse Norman who didn’t disclose attendance at the Franco-British Colloque in January 2017 chaired by Pierre Andre de Chalendar, boss of French construction giant St Gobain, to which Celotex belongs: one of the firms that produced the flammable panels of cladding in the Grenfell Tower disaster?
Jesse Norman, former co-chair of the Construction Leadership Council, a Government initiated industry body made up of a highly selective group of large contractors and consultants and a leading house builder that Norman describes as “the business led sector council which advises Government on key strategic issues” whose ‘Innovation in Building’ workstream was led by St Gobain representatives?
Is it that Jesse Norman you voted for to get justice for the victims of cladding suppliers?
Just a thought, but why impose a tax on people who provide employment by running a business? If they shut down, society instantly supports their workers. If they expand, somewhere down the line an unemployed person gets work, moves from being on the debit to credit side of government balance sheet, as now they are employed and passing a proportion off the wages their employers pays them on in tax.
So if we do tax businesses at all, why not make what they pay inversely proportional to the number if people they employ (or the total wages they pay, or a blend of both) in this country?
If you want to come to Britain nd start a business, or live here already and start a business, then let's encourage it in proportion to the wages paid and people employed.
Not sure I understand you, ID. Do you mean that smaller businesses should pay a higher % of tax, and the biggest businesses (let's choose Amazon as an example) should pay a lower rate?
I think more aggressive sliding scales on both Corporation & Dividend Taxes might solve quite a few problems. Wouldn't be implemented by the Tories, for obvious reasons
If we're discussing taxes, I propose the following:
1. Wealth tax - add up your liquid assets, savings, shares, land value, other assets and impose a flat %-age except for the first, say £500k
2. VAT on products (but not personal services)
3. Income and director's dividends to be taxed equally. If I take home £20k - whether from income or from running a business - I should pay precisely the same amount of tax regardless of origin. We could call it the Takehome Tax. Simpler than current system and vastly fairer. Also, would make plumbers really angry, which is often amusing
A couple of quick changes I would introduce:
- make OAPs pay NI contributions, like anyone else. Wouldn't affect those who are hard up, who are below the NI contribution threshold.
- abolish pension fund contribution tax relief except on standard-rate income tax. If you're earning enough to pay higher-rate income tax, you don't need an extra incentive to save for your retirement.
- I'd also stop people being allowed to withdraw money early from their pension funds. A mad recent innovation, which has led to loads of vulnerable / gullible people being conned, and who will eventually be a burden on the state when their depleted / vanished pension leaves them in old-age poverty.
By the way you’re ignoring the question, Titus, can I presume that your commitment to getting justice for victims of cladding suppliers is so hand-wringingly luke-warm that you really did vote in Jesse Norman, who couldn’t have done much more to stop victims of dodgy cladding suppliers getting fleeced or getting justice and couldn’t have done more to facilitate dodgy cladding suppliers, and help them get away with it?
Oh, please be true, that would be so poetic!
Sinnick - respectfully disagree. Land values are evaluated - try buying a piece of land and you'll see a sale price which has been arrived at in much the same way as property prices. Of courses these values will drift over time, and will need re-evaluating - every 10 years, say.
As Wren pointed out in a sub a couple of weeks back, a hefty %age of British land is still in the families of the Norman invaders. 1,000 years is quite a long time - with a land tax eroding their ownership we would have a more equitable distribution by now
You must log in to post.
