How would Labour’s proposed tax grab affect your home?

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that Labour’s publication ‘Land for the Many’ is a set of policy ideas that solves the housing crisis. Increasing the supply of affordable housing and freeing up land to build, improving access to existing stock and transparency sounds fair, right? Yet tucked away inside the report, you’ll find a range of measures that could pull the market as we know it to pieces; it’s the most radical sets of property proposals since the mass building plan after the Second World War.

The report’s editor, George Monbiot, has not thought through the unintended consequences of the proposals. Just one example and perhaps the most damaging is the desire to reduce land prices. With government (national and local), institutions and pension funds and religious organisations being the most prolific landowners, often on our behalf, this would be an economic disaster. It would undermine the nation’s ability to pay for any of the measures they propose, by reducing our ability to borrow efficiently.