Business rates: not such a good tax after all

Taxes, eh? Just when you think you’ve found a good one, it lets you down. We usually think of business rates as some of the least bad taxes we’ve got, because to a large extent they’re like land value taxes. Land value taxes are far from perfect but they do less harm than most taxes. For a start, they tend to fall on landowners, rather than land occupiers, because the supply is fixed. Tim Worstall explains this here, and the empirical evidence is quite strong that a £1 rise in rates leads to a nearly-commensurate fall in rents over the long term.

They’re also less distortionary. A good rule of thumb is that if you tax something, you get less of it, which is why taxes on capital are such a bad idea. But since there’s a fixed supply of land, taxing the value of land doesn’t get you less of anything. Nice one.

Unfortunately this might not be how business rates really work, because they tax the value of property rather than land. To a large extent this is a tax on land and that’s all fine and dandy, but you’ll notice that a five star hotel costs more to stay in than the Bates Motel next door, even though the land they’re built on is worth the same. This is because the actual bricks and mortar on top of that land have different values too.

The British Property Federation (and chums) have a new report out today which points out that this might be a serious flaw in business rates. They argue that most landowners have other investments too, and will shift their money from property to those investments when business rates rise:

A rise in business rates will reduce the rents that a landlord is able to achieve and therefore reduce the potential level of new real estate investments by a sum equal to the value of the tax burden transferred from occupiers to landlords business rates … If a proportion of business rate increases are capitalised into lower rents, then there is a likelihood that this will impact on the level of new funded commercial development.

That’s an important point – I’m not sure about the numbers they use, which suggest an extremely high elasticity of investment that I don’t think is justifiable, but it’s still an important point.

Just as important: the less frequently revaluations are done, the more uncertainty there is in the system. Uncertainty is a deadweight loss – it destroys wealth and makes everyone worse off. As we’ve pointed out, it’s not difficult to estimate property values on a rolling basis.

What’s really interesting about this report is not just what it’s saying but who’s saying it. Most industry bodies are woeful on business rates – they wrongly assume that the incidence is on firms because they’re the guys writing the cheques. For the BPF to come out and reject this – and do so with reference to most of the existing academic literature, no less – is very encouraging. But they do have a point about the investment effect.

So, must we throw business rates on the scrapheap too? It depends on the elasticity of investment – how much less money goes on property investment when rents fall after rates rise. And the way to fix things is quite simple: tax the value of the land, not the property that’s built on it.

ASI's Budget 2015 wishlist: A tax code that actually makes sense

Nobody designing the UK’s tax code from scratch would come up with one like the system we have now. Our taxes are complicated and inefficient and divert capital away from productive investments that would boost economic growth. This year, we’re hoping for a Budget that reforms the tax code in line with the best economics out there, reforming the worst taxes and cutting the tax burden on investment and the working poor: VAT: broaden the base and use the money to help the poor

The huge number of exemptions to VAT make the tax so inefficient that if we raised the rate to 20% on every good we could compensate every household and still have a few billion pounds left over. If, instead, we raised every good to the 20% flat rate, but compensated only households earning less than median income, we'd have billions left over to reduce the deficit. The money raised should be given back to people on low pay through tax credits and to create a higher national insurance contributions threshold, which would increase the incentive to work on the other end.

Capital Gains Tax: abolish it outright to boost growth

Capital Gains Tax (CGT) is an extremely inefficient tax on capital that reduces overall investment and raises just £5bn annually. CGT reduces investment, 'locks-in' capital to less productive investments and can be avoided by not investing in assets that will rise in price, so it is distortionary and ends up directing investment away from riskier assets like start-up business debt. Scrapping CGT would not cost a lot (and could be paid for with the money left over from the VAT broadening, above), and would boost investment and growth, boosting wages across the board.

Business rates & council tax: revalue with a view to eventually merge

Business rates & council tax are in theory some of the least bad taxes on the books. As long as the values they are levied on are kept up-to-date, they reduce economic activity much less than most taxes. But in the modern world house prices and land prices move rapidly and not uniformly. The North is currently being hammered—paying business rates far higher than their property deserves—the South is winning out with unfairly cheap payments. Council tax is even worse: the band system is out-of-date and should be replaced with a fluid penny in the pound system like rates, while the revaluation long postponed from 1993 should be done now and then kept constantly up-to-date. If Zoopla can get good estimates of property values then surely HMT can too. Eventually the two systems should be merged at the same rate, so that housing and business both go where they are most in demand.

For further comments or to arrange an interview, contact Kate Andrews, Head of Communications, at kate@old.adamsmith.org | 07584 778207.

Osborne scraps the worst tax in Britain – the ASI's reaction to the Autumn Statement

Here are our comments on today's Autumn Statement: Stamp duty:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

The old stamp duty slab system was one of the worst taxes Britain had, and we welcome the Chancellor's radicalism in abolishing it, rather than simply tinkering around the edges.

According to the best economic research, raising £1 through stamp duty imposes £2-£5 of cost on the economy. Though it will still, as a transactions tax, cost the economy heavily, the reform will reduce the economic cost substantially. This is a tax cut for the squeezed middle that will make a big difference to a lot of people's lives. Politically, it could be a game-changer.

Business rates:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

A cap on business rate rises is welcome but the rates system itself needs more fundamental reform. The longer rates take to be revalued, the more distortionary the system is, penalising firms located in areas that have done badly since the last valuation. The longer the gap between rates revaluations, the greater the penalty for businesses in poorer areas and the effective subsidy for businesses in richer ones. Ideally the government should move towards a system of constantly rolling rates revaluations. If Zoopla can judge land values accurately on a rolling basis, so can HM Treasury.

Road infrastructure:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

Infrastructure investment, especially into congested roads, is bound to pass a cost-benefit analysis. The problem is that we had to wait this long. If private firms could build roads, funded by tolls, then we'd likely have all of these roads already. As well as providing funds for investment, and making sure the investment goes to the most in-demand areas, pricing roads also means they get used more efficiently.

Pensions: 55% tax, tax-free inherited ISA

Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Eamonn Butler, said:

The Chancellor is right to kill off the iniquitous 55% tax on inherited pensions, as well as the tax on inherited ISAs. If people have saved for their retirement but die before exhausting their nest-egg, it should go straight to their dependents, not to the Chancellor.

NHS Spending:

Communications Manager at the Adam Smith Institute, Kate Andrews, said:

The Conservatives, along with the opposition parties, are playing politics with the NHS budget. Everyone is vying to be seen as the 'party of the NHS' but no one is willing to have a serious conversation about the reforms that could make the NHS financially viable for the next ten years, let alone for future generations; like charging small fees for non-emergency visits.

It's been estimated that the NHS could fall into a budget crisis as early as 2015, which could result in cuts to core staff, longer patient waiting lists, and a deterioration in the quality of health care. While the extra £2 billion per year proposed by Osborne today will offsets short-term worries, it merely kicks the can down the road for a little while longer. Serious proposals to address the spending and demand that comes with free care ‘at the point of use’ could not come soon enough.

Personal Allowance rise:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

The Adam Smith Institute has called for the personal allowance to be raised to the full-time minimum wage rate for over a decade and it is welcome to see the government move in this direction. But the National Insurance Contributions threshold has been left untouched, which costs full-time minimum wage workers £667.68 a year. To really help low-income workers the Chancellor should make raising the National Insurance threshold one of his top priorities.

Capital gains tax on property for foreigners:

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, said:

Capital gains taxes are some of the worst ones on the statute book, making society poorer by reducing the efficiency of investment and its total amount, but if we have to have them then everyone should pay them.

This is not just because of fairness, but because it causes massive distortions when different groups face different tax rates. In this case it's likely to both lead to excessive foreign ownership of property—both by favouring foreigners over natives in property taxes and by favouring property over other assets for foreigners.

Masters degree loans:

Director of The Entrepreneurs Network, Philip Salter, said:

By extending Entrepreneurs’ Relief and R&D tax credits George Osborne is backing Britain’s entrepreneurs. However, the government’s intervention in the postgraduate student loan market risks crowding out private sector solutions. Banks already provide Professional and Career Development Loans, and entrepreneurial companies like Future Finance, StudentFunder and Prodigy Finance are responding to the demand for loans for postgraduate studies. We are on the verge of the equivalent of the funding revolution we are seeing in SME finance but this intervention risks stymieing it.

The deficit:

Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:

The deficit is still enormous and much higher than anybody expected at the beginning of this Parliament. We are borrowing £100bn this year, both because planned cuts to the welfare budget have not taken place and because the growth we have had has not translated into much extra tax revenue. But as high as this is, the Chancellor’s plans to reduce the deficit still seem credible – financial markets are lending to the country at unprecedentedly cheap levels and once productivity eventually does start to recover, things should begin to look considerably better.

Notes to editors:

For further comments or to arrange an interview, contact Kate Andrews, Communications Manager, at kate@old.adamsmith.org / 07584 778207.

The Adam Smith Institute is an independent libertarian think tank based in London. It advocates classically liberal public policies to create a richer, freer world.