These last few years of being a landlord have been hell – I feel insulted
If you’re a landlord, or anyone with assets, then like me you’ve probably been avoiding the news and the avid speculation about the next Budget.
Knowing we have a party in power who want to tax the pips out of everything is soul destroying.
It’s no surprise then to read today that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, wants to put National Insurance (NI) on rental income.
The fact this idea was first proposed last year by the Resolution Foundation – whose previous chief executive Torsten Bell is now a Labour MP and has been promoted to run Reeves’s preparations for the forthcoming Budget – should make you shudder.
I’ve just thought to myself: how much longer can I hang on? Or is it now time to quit?
These last few years of being a landlord have been hell. First, we had the Conservatives who unleashed a world of financial pain with their removal of tax relief on mortgage interest. Then we had – still have – the ongoing EPC debacle.
Labour’s Renters’ Reform Bill is making its way through Parliament and with it the effective erosion of property rights. Set that against the backdrop of Making Tax Digital (yet another cooked-up scheme which will cost landlords more money and time) and NI on rental income feels like the final straw.
The fact the Government can even label rental income “unearned income” is an insult in itself. Rental properties and tenants do not look after themselves – that is the role of a landlord. My tenants do not fix dripping taps, sort broken boilers or climb roofs to correct slipped tiles. Ask them who they should call in such a situation and they will say the landlord.
Unearned income? Try tracking down, chasing and getting a contractor to attend to a job and you’ll know it’s not unearned.
But we live in a Labour world of hypocrisy and selective blindness where a minister in charge of homelessness evicts her tenants and Angela Rayner, our Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary, thought it was morally okay to buy a holiday home – while already having two homes to live in – in a housing crisis.
For all their talk of protecting the “working people”, Labour MPs are so far removed from understanding working people it’s enough to make you want to join the exodus of British people fleeing these shores.
One of the easiest and laziest ways to introduce new taxes is by doing it on a group that successive governments have waged war against and made the general public hate more than drug dealers and sex traffickers.
Landlords have become the scapegoats for everything.
But what most people fail to understand is that the “unearned income” boundaries will widen. First, they will start with unearned income from property. Next it will be pensions, then it will be savings. In the end, all unearned income – which, by the way, was income that originally was earned and had tax paid on it – will be subject to these new taxes.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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