-
14/7/25 8:13 pm
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Rumours that the Chancellor is to raid the holiday and short-lets market with extra taxes including bringing the sector into the VAT system have been criticised by a leading economist.
Such taxes would be on top of already mooted plans to levy National Insurance on landlord incomes from rental activity.
All these ‘leaked’ proposals are part of Rachel Reeve’s much-publicised efforts to find new tax revenues and repair a claimed ‘black hole’ in the public finances.
But a raid on landlords has been heavily criticised by economist Paul Johnson (main image), the former head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and now a Times columnist.
During an NRLA interview with Ben Beadle and Richard Blanco for the landlord lobbying group’s podcast, he vented his frustration at the way tax policy related to rented housing is made.
Johnson, who is also now Provost at The Queen’s College, Oxford said: “I think you need to think very carefully about how to tax housing and how to tax rental housing, and the first myth to bust is the idea… that somehow landlords are under-taxed relative to owner-occupiers, which is complete nonsense.
“If you make it more expensive to be a landlord, then there will be some combination of fewer landlords and higher rent.”
“If you make it more expensive to be a landlord, then there will be some combination of fewer landlords and higher rent.”
He urged the Government to set out a long-term plan for the taxation of housing and property, and to maintain it consistently over the years ahead. That, he argued, would end the “uncertainty and the sense that each year there's a little bit of a budget deficit we need to look [to the private rented sector] for grabbing money.”
Like Kemi Badenoch, Johnson is keen to scrap stamp duty altogether, although he didn’t make it clear whether that would include landlords, something the Tory leader isn’t keen on.
Ben Beadle, Chief Executive of the National Residential Landlords Association, adds: “Ahead of the Budget the Government must heed Paul Johnson’s sage advice. Too often the way rental property is taxed is based on nothing more than topping up the coffers from one year to the next. Such knee jerk and short-term thinking is no way to run an economy.
“What is needed is a consistent tax strategy that gives responsible landlords the confidence to invest in the decent long-term homes for rent that so many people desperately need.”
Tags:
Comments