General Election 8th June – Who on earth do landlords vote for?

Reply to the comment left by "NW Landlord" at "20/05/2017 - 20:45":

thanks NW, I re-read your comment and the previous 3/4 pages of this thread. It now seems clear what you were saying.

Reply to the comment left by "Barry Fitzpatrick" at "20/05/2017 - 20:45":

When he uses the word 'investment' he is implying 'passive investment,' so that is the point I would focus on in the next reply. It is good he has come out strongly against the retrospective nature of it though (and just wants to discourage all new expansion of BTL during a housing shortage! )

No worries

Reply to the comment left by "Barry Fitzpatrick" at "20/05/2017 - 11:40":

I've come to the thread just today and havent read everything.
-
Is he (AK) really in our industry or is he in the corporate outsourcing / support industry?
eg google 'Andrew knee + lms'.

I have only justheard his name and spent 5 mins on google, but Isuspect he is 'one of them' and not 'one of us'.

There's a lot of people out there that have strong opinions on the buy to let market without never experiencing what it's like to manage and run a property portfolio

Barry, if you want to give him an idea of the range of the work we do, you could start with Appendix 5 of my report and add to it, mentioning the 150-200 regulations we also have to follow. Ask him if this constitutes a passive investment in his view. If it does, you could ask if the work of letting agents and managing agents, housing associations and councils also is passive (when they are sorting out tenant issues, maintenance and so on) as their work resembles our work in many ways. The link to the report for those who want to see it is here:

https://www.property118.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/6G0YKMd1Wf.pdf

Reply to the comment left by "Jay James" at "20/05/2017 - 20:57":

Andrew Knee is CEO of Legal Marketing Services Limited (LMS) http://www.lms.com

LMS is a provider of "conveyancing panel management services" whatever those are. Sounds like a glorified mortgage broker/conveyancer. They are not as close to the PRS as a Landlord or letting agent is, but close enough to understand the implications of s.24.

Reply to the comment left by "Dr Rosalind Beck" at "20/05/2017 - 15:44":

Hi Ros

David Kingman’s propaganda “report”, published by the Intergenerational Foundation in November 2013, just after he graduated in Geography, claimed the subsidy was £5bn.
http://www.if.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Why-BTL-Equals-Big-Tax-Rip-off.pdf

As an exercise in distortion of the facts it was excellent. It was analysed here:
https://www.property118.com/landlord-tax-grab-source-document-exposed/83110/

His Executive Summary on page 7 starts with “Landlords receive a public subsidy worth up to £5 billion in tax relief per year. This is relief that they are able to claim for their business expenses, including the 10% “wear and tear” allowance and interest relief on mortgages.”

Every enterprise in the country deducts its costs from its receipts to calculate its taxable profit. It was a deliberate distortion of the truth to mis-describe this process as a subsidy. The word subsidise means to help by giving money, to pay part of the cost of something. Landlords do not receive anything from the government. On the contrary, they pay tax to the government.

Pages 18 and 19 reveal that the £5 billion is the amount that David Kingman calculates that landlords would have paid in EXTRA tax in 2010/11 IF NO BUSINESS COSTS AT ALL HAD BEEN ALLOWED, if there were no personal allowance and if all landlords paid tax at 40% on all their rental income.

On page 18:
“How much does tax relief cost?
Figures released by HMRC in 2013 in response to a Freedom of Information request provided the following evidence of the cost of tax relief on rental income (all data is for the 2010–11 tax year, as this was the most recent period for which figures were available):
Total number of landlords who claimed some form of tax relief: 1.2 million
Total amount claimed in tax relief: £13 billion
Mortgage interest relief: £6 billion
Other tax-deductible expenses: £7 billion”

On page 19:
If all landlords were 20% taxpayers then the amount of lost revenue would be somewhere around £2.6 billion. If they were all 40% taxpayers then it would be twice that, £5.2 billion. Therefore, the amount of tax subsidy they receive for their business expenses is somewhere within this range, probably towards the higher end of it, because the evidence suggests that landlords are on average a relatively wealthy class of individuals.”

So the £5 billion “public subsidy” is the extra tax which David Kingman estimates that landlords would have paid for 2010/11 if they were not allowed to deduct any costs whatsoever. What the fool did not seem to realise is that many landlords would be bankrupted by this and that even landlords with no borrowings would balk at paying tax at 45% on their rent receipts without deduction for repairs, ground rent, insurance, council tax, agents’ fees and all their other business costs.

To describe this -the failure to over-tax individual landlords out of the market - as a public subsidy beggars belief. Is this what university education has come to?

?

This whole thing is a scandal that could end up being a movie or TV show