Labour plans higher council tax for empty homeowners

[dutchman]

Wealthy investors who buy properties in London and keep them empty will be forced to pay even higher council tax under plans set out by Ed Miliband on Tuesday.



The Labour leader said he would target London’s 60,000 “ghost homes” by letting councils charge double their usual council tax on properties left empty for more than a year.

For the past year, local authorities have been allowed to charge up to 50 per cent extra on homes left empty for two years through the so-called Empty Homes Premium.

Mr Miliband also said he would go further, ending loopholes that allow absentee owners to avoid higher council tax rates by placing items of furniture in their empty homes, and promised to force developers of newly built properties to market their schemes in the UK at the same time as offering them to overseas buyers.

The move comes just days after Labour made a bid for the votes of private tenants by promising to introduce longer tenancies in the private sector along with restrictions on how fast rents can rise during that period.

“We’ve got to stop this phenomenon of empty properties being bought by overseas investors and nothing done about it,” Mr Miliband said at the launch of Labour’s local elections campaign.

“We live in one of the richest, most diverse and exciting cities that has ever existed on the planet, but the connection between the great wealth London creates and everyday family finances has been broken.”

The Labour leader claimed that there were 60,000 empty homes in London. In recent years there has been an influx of foreign buyers investing in new-build apartments in the capital – some buying entirely for the potential capital gains and not even bothering to rent them out.

It emerged earlier this year that a third of homes on The Bishops Avenue in north London, thought to be the most expensive street in London, were empty. Some had been vacant for decades.

Mr Miliband said ordinary families were increasingly becoming priced out of many boroughs in the capital, where the average home now costs £363,000: “I think it is increasingly becoming that way.”

Labour said only half of Tory-run councils in London were using the powers to increase council tax on empty homes, in contrast to all 15 Labour-run authorities which were doing so.

[rebbonk]

Miliband is a waste of space. The muppet isn't fit to lick the boots of those that created the Labour Party.