Council Tax Valuation Bands Bill [HL]

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Friday 22nd April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

I want to say a word on the retrospection point. Recently, the Chancellor of the Exchequer reduced the rate of capital gains tax from 28% to 20%. That new rate will apply to gains which are realised after, I think, 5 April this year on gains which have already been made which, if the sale of the asset subject to capital gains tax had been made earlier, would have been at 28%. So changes in tax rates do have an element of retrospection.

I do not believe, frankly, that we are going to have a lot of widows who bought a house since the year 2000 finding that they are paying enormous new sums, as my noble friend mentioned. The big increases have probably been in the last five years and it is very unlikely that widows have paid millions of pounds for houses in the last five years or so and therefore suddenly find that they are put on to a new rate. I think it would be perfectly reasonable that they should be put on to a new rate if that were the case.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

I was not planning to intervene in this debate and I very much support the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord True, but how does the noble Lord cater for those cases where very expensive houses are held by offshore companies and it is not the transfer of the asset within the UK which causes ownership to change but the ownership of the shares of the offshore company? It seems to me that that cannot be readily catered for within the system. Fundamentally, also, how does the noble Lord address the very telling point, made by the noble Lord, Lord True, that we are going to end up with two schedules of valuation? Properties next to one another, otherwise identical, will, under the noble Lord’s system, be paying completely different council tax. That cannot be sensible.

[Lord Marlesford]

Of course there are two schedules: it is the whole purpose that properties migrate, when they change hands, on to the new schedule. People who are currently occupying a property, if it was acquired before 2000, will be on the old schedule and there will be no change at all. Even in my illustrative table, for most people there will be no change anyway, because although the bands will be different and there will be some losers and some gainers, they will not be very big ones.

On the noble Lord’s very important point about overseas people, I have always believed that one way of dealing with the abuse of the overseas purchase of property should be that British law should be so administered that ownership is not recognised unless the property has been properly registered by the Land Registry in the name of a person. If that happened, people would be very hesitant to acquire expensive property without getting a proper Land Registry entry, because that is the proof of ownership—if you are going to buy something, you want to be absolutely certain who you are buying it from. The noble Lords raises a perfectly valid point which should be dealt with, although it is not dealt with in this Bill.

I think that this is an idea worth pursuing. It may be that we will want to make further amendments on Report—if there is time to do it before the new Session, which is probably rather unlikely—but I think that the Bill is an advance worth making and I therefore ask my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.