Larry Elliott (Scrap council tax – wealthy homeowners must pay more, 2 August) is absolutely right to argue for replacing council tax with some form of land value tax (LVT). But why stop there? Wealth taxes are harder to avoid, close the gap between rich and poor, and, if income taxes are reduced accordingly, reward both enterprise and modest living. Conversely, sourcing so much of our public revenue from income, profit and transactions requires a velocity of economic activity that is ecologically unsustainable.

Nick Wilkins

Campaign for Asset Based Taxation

• Larry Elliott makes a case for a LVT. That seems an elegant solution but it will penalise those whose houses (and by implication the land on which they are built) have increased in value but whose salaries have not increased over the years by anything like the same rate. This could include pensioners and low paid workers, likely to be especially impacted in London. This could be more regressive than the council tax.

There is a perfectly simple and even more elegant solution: a local income tax. This would be based as a fraction of income, like normal taxes, and would require those who earned more to pay more. That would go a long way to restoring the imbalance that council tax – and other regressive taxes – have created over the last few decades.

John Ellis

Tavistock, Devon

• Replacing council tax with a green LVT is long overdue. While the government is at it, make this contribution the responsibility of the property owner not the tenant. While this may sound outrageous to some (landlords perhaps?), it’s already the case in Australia for example.

Matt Campbell

Leeds

• In 1948 our impoverished large family bought a large, freezing-cold house at a knockdown price in Manchester. In 1958, we decorated and heated it. In 1968 most large Victorian houses in Oxford, now £3m each, were neglected multi-bed-sits, worth nothing; you literally “couldn’t give them away” due to maintenance costs. In 1990, many “posh” homes were plunged into negative equity for years, due to Thatcher-era mortgage interest of 12.5%. In 1970, land development tax on the “profits” from planning permission was abandoned when it stopped all house building. A multi-million-pound home becomes a liability overnight when markets seize up. If the UK’s 30m £220,000 average homes (£6.6tn) are clumsily taxed, that £6.6tn “asset” could evaporate – plunging house-proud Britons into decades of depression. Land value tax levied on withheld brown land has worked well in the US, but needs caution. A new market-destroying tax on homes, as the UK also plunges into Brexit bankruptcy, is a very bad idea. Leave Brits with our optimistic illusions of vast property wealth – and build 2m low-priced affordable prefabs immediately.

Noel Hodson

Director, Tax Reconciliations, Oxford

• While Larry Elliott’s recommendation, that an equitable property tax would be both fair and sensible, it does little more that shake a stick at an elephant. The vast problem is the extent of inequality across the globe. The way the economy is structured, progress ensures that those who best understand what is going on are winners, while those of us who struggle to exist are condemned to be losers. When money is god, those with money can always find an alternative solution. If we are to do anything about anything, we first have to want to.

Martin London

Henllan, Denbighshire

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