In the introduction to his second book on the financial crisis, Vince noted:
“…one of the main tasks of opposition parties [is] to redesign the archaic, inequitable and unpopular system of property taxation… to make council tax more closely proportional to the value of property. A more radical and far-reaching reform would be to give practical substance to long-mooted ideas for the taxation of land… The practical problems of valuation and making the transition from a land market massively distorted by planning have so far frightened away reformers. But such a reform is now long overdue.”

In concluding he wrote:
“In principle, wealth taxation in the form of proportional levies on property values or land values should be easy to impose since property and land are immobile… Such taxes are … favoured by economists because they do …not discourage work or saving. We have proxies for wealth tax in the form of capital gains tax, but it excludes owner-occupied property and addresses only capital appreciation, not the stock of capital, which is …easily avoided through inter vivos gifts.
Without doubt a theoretically superior approach would be a land value tax, an idea that can be traced back to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Henry George and Winston Churchill, and which has advocates on both right and left, and in the radical centre of politics. Such taxation has the additional merit of helping to deflate volatile bubbles in land and property values, and discourage the hoarding or inefficient use of land… Why, beyond a few limited experiments, has a land value tax never been tried in over two hundred years? Practical issues of valuation and the big gains and losses of moving from our current system help to explain it. There is, however, a strong case for moving incrementally in this direction, through a land value based approach to commercial property taxation or by trying to capture the value of land for the public in other ways; public land banks and/or community land auctions.
There is enormous scope for arguing about the detail of tax policy, but the strategic objective, on grounds of both fairness and economic efficiency, should be to shift tax from income to assets – property and land as well as to expenditure, provided that the latter can be applied progressively (maintaining VAT exemptions) or applied to goods that create wider social costs (carbon-based fuels, for example).
…the instability and inequalities generated by property and land markets were a major feature of the financial crisis. They lie at the heart of a distorted system of credit. They underpin a growing divide in the housing market between social classes and generations. And they cut to the heart of what it means to have a common identity, to belong to the same society. Political indifference is not sustainable.”

In the aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy will we, at long last, see the kind of radical reforms that Vince wrote about in 2016?

* Joe is a member of Hounslow Liberal Democrats and Chair of ALTER.