Just read that. Hope it's the case. Already stressed out.
Movers seem to have issues with "resources" , ie. two guys turned up 2 hours late this morning and there is still far more left to pack and load than I am comfortable with.
The one thing I paid through the nose to not be worried about is now another nightmare .

You can tell I'm in a good mood .

A land tax is an invitation to corruption on a vast scale. Its also really hard to administer a system which keeps pace with sociological changes. Twenty years ago in most towns the highest priced real estate would have been in the town centre. Now its likely to be nowehere near as valuable as the best residential areas.

A land tax has to take into account cashflow, and the value of alternative uses, which is the biggest problem with it. Like it or not, its far easier to track, and tax, actual cash flow. The problem with corporate and income tax as an approach isn't the basic tax, its the loopholes which are allowed to develop (some originally for legitimate reasons such as to encourage investment).

Also, yes, if a an asset is of national benefit, everyone should pay a share for it, even those who don't use it. You cannot have a workable tax system where people can choose to opt out. In fact if you allow that you end up in the ultimate free market universe.

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30309468[/url HMRC seem to confirm that the new rules kick in at exchange rather than completion, although if you've already exchanged before today then you have the choice of which charge to go for, one of my daughters jobs is to prepare the final accounts at completion so you can imagine her delight at this ruling yesterday

Please explain how you reach that conclusion



It's a dynamic system, you don't apply a value and leave it alone for decades



Without transparent country-by-country reporting, there's absolutely zero chance of effectively tracking income and corporation taxes. Land doesn't move, its use may change but try convincing the tax authorities that the parcel of land you've just purchased in the City of London is an allotment and you intend growing leeks



No one is arguing against national assets being developed and paid for from central funds. Perhaps you could explain how the DLR benefits a sheep farmer in Cumbria

Just spoke with my solicitor. It's as I thought, everyone in our chain will have to give their solicitor instruction as to which system to use today prior to completion.
It's been a total mess, and HMRC have not been much help.

Have to be out if here by 1pm and not heard anything about completion yet.

The Super Rich and Us on BBC 2 last night was probably one of the most important financial documentaries of recent years. It explained how today's massive inequality has been created from the 1970s right up to the present day by the wealthy cashing in on the debt of the poor. An interesting stat emerged from the 2008 banking bailout. If the £375 billion had been evenly spread across Britain it would have meant £24,000 landing on every door step. Instead it made its way into the hands of the top 1%, a minority who were already rather well off.

Worth a watch but be prepared for your pi$$ boiling.

Agreed a very thought provoking programme - what I get from it is Capitalism is the without a doubt the best vehicle for wealth generation but the wealth needs spreading out in a more equitable nature.

I can't ever see it changing, it will always be the same money in the same hands. My old man always says "when the bird $hit$ it $hit$ on the biggest pile".

The classic car feature was the most interesting for me. I've followed classic car prices for as long as I can remember and they have never been as mental as they are now. Even classics at the very bottom end of the market that could once be picked up in the Auto Trader for 10 grand, and we're only talking 10 years ago, are suddenly fetching 50 grand with demand and price rises ever pushing them out of the reach of genuinely fanatical average Joes. Last year a Ferrari 250GTO, considered the holy grail among many, sold at auction in California for just shy of £23 million! Just when did that become possible? A lot of the classic car auctions have now become pi$$ing contests for the super rich. Wealthy buyers will often have a collection of cars in the hundreds that just sit in storage, undriven, as collected trophies of their obscene wealth flaunted at auction.

The crash of 2008 may have left many of 'us' in disarray but the 'super-rich' have never had it so good.

Jeez SP.


You are sailing into unchartered waters. Are the lifeboats manned?
You have just taken a positive move from 14 to 13 on the litmus scale.
Keep up the good work.

The problem with "investments" such as these is that they are worth precisely £0 until you can find another "super rich" person to give you more than £23million for it, only then will your "investment" be worthy of the name, until then its just a VERY expensive car sitting in your garage that, if you were honest with yourself, you didn't intend to pay quite so much for had it not been for that day in that auction house and in that buying frenzy, and you just hope that that situation can be recreated at the time when you need to cash in your "asset", otherwise its going to get very embarrassing.

But we're talking about the super rich here. What's £23 million when you're a billionaire? It's barely even a drop in the ocean.

It's the investors at the bottom end who will suffer if/when the bottom drops out of the market. A lot of those bottom end prices are false and are relying on the wealthy keeping the equally false prices high at the top end. The bottom has dropped out before, it will happen again.

Oh I think £23million is a little more than a drop in the ocean even to a billionaire - the thing with most billionaire's is that they don't just throw around £23million as if its you or I spending £5, most billionaires made their billions themselves as there weren't many billionaires from the last generation to pass it on as inheritance and in being so most of them have a fairly good idea about accountancy - the phrase "the cost of everything and the value of nothing" springs to mind and I'm pretty sure that most of them know that £23million is a hell of a lot of money to gamble on a car and the fact that you need another punter just as daft as you in order to turn a profit.

Dont worry, there will be another show about people claiming a couple of grand in benefits soon to take people's mind of it.

I think there was one on Channel 5 at the same time, but when poverty porn has sunk as low as Channel 5 you know it's been done to death.

You can always tell the posters on here who get a little bit of a hard on when discussing cash.
Those who've got it.
Those who haven't, but would really love to have it.

It's mildly amusing.

At my wifes work people were discussing this program and try as she might she could not get them to see how the issues in the super-rich program were far bigger than a minority exploiting the benefits system.

The propaganda has worked.

It really pi55es me off. People get so worked up about the unemployed having loads of babies or claiming disability when that money is just small change in reality. These people don't realise that large companies avoiding taxes and banks needing to be bailed out is what's costing them the real money. Politicians are claiming benifits on anything they can get away with but I'll ignore that, some bint without a job has gone and got herself pregnant.

It's not people on benefits that cost money. What costs money is the ridiculous number of people employed in public sector office jobs who are unproductive, spend their time in meetings and get good pension provision. That and the number of ultra-high paid "executives" who have had their packages justified by comparison with the private sector when in fact they could never command such salaries in the private sector. All public sector staff earning more than, say, £35,000 should be dismissed and asked to reapply for their jobs with lower salaries on offer. Let's see what their "market rate" is then!

I know a human resources manager who works for a well known high street bank and she's on over 90k a year for basically attending meetings and making calls. Show me a 'real world' HR Manager who earns over 90k. She'd be lucky to get even half that.

You could say the same about the NHS pen-pushers that were shipped-orf by Hunt and his predecessor, all with good pay-outs.

Problem was, it didn't take them long before they realised they shouldn't really have these bods go and they were soon re-employed as independent contractors and ended up costing the NHS more. But hey, at least Camoron could point to the number of staff they'd shed.

We all know you have a particular beef about what you perceive to be non-productive public sector staff but as usual, "you know nothing Jon Snow"

I can't speak for the whole NHS but whilst I was at York Hospital it needed more not fewer admin staff, it would've saved them money.

The same went for doctors and nurses. It needed more not fewer, and so would save on locum staff.

Coming from a family with multiple NHS workers I can also vouch for this, based on 2nd hand info of course. The one complaint I hear about admin is the number of management types who do square root of feck all in the way of actual admin, that allows patients to get sorted faster etc, and just go to meetings about why they aren't getting through enough admin.

Yep. As a for instance, I worked primarily with the Health Records dept and the majority of records were placed with a private storage company but there was next to no storage available on-site at the hospital and that was now full. So we developed our own off-site storage centre. It was significantly cheaper than at the private storage company. But because the trust wasn't prepared to fund the establishment of a proper centre (one that could store all records, free up space at the hospital and be cheaper in the long run) those records remained with the private company and we just dealt with the overflow.
I've heard it's since been closed down due to it needing some more investment that they weren't prepared to pay.

So because they weren't prepared to pay the initial set-up costs (and no senior manager was prepared to take responsibility for the problem) they now have higher on-going costs.
I worked out at the time it would cost roughly 3p per item/record per year including setup costs. At the private company it costed (this was around 2007 if memory serves) 37p.

That may be true but that really isn't the way the debate is being framed is it? It is all about benefit cheats when we face losses in tax income exponentially greater than that.

You may have a point about over inflated salaries in the public sector but I'd suggest even that issue pales into insignificance compared to banking bailouts and tax avoidance.

It is just another distraction to get angry about that is overall, much less of a problem when you look at the actual amounts involved.

If it is not benefits cheats, it is public sector salaries. Both ought to be far down the pecking order of issues to address.

That is complete tosh, as you probably know, you just like to push the myth. If Universities can still be classed as public sector the vast majority of staff earning over £35k would earn more in the private sector.