A report last week in the Telegraph informs us that in the next five years HMRC expects property related taxes to increase from £7 Billion to £18 Billion.
The main taxes are Stamp Duty, inheritance tax on property, capital gains tax, and vat on property transactions including legal work.
I believe that increasingly, homeowners are simply caretakers of an asset for future government revenue. If you own a £1M house, who really is the biggest beneficiary when you die ? There will be 400K IHT, possible CGT, and stamp duty of 50K ad infinitum for the next 500 years. Multiply that by at least ten or twenty for the lifetime of the house and we can see that the government, not you or I, actually own the property.
Now imagine that the house burns down, there is no insurance, and it is not rebuilt. In the short term the homeowner is the biggest loser, however in the medium and long term it will always be the government.
Surely if homeowners are protecting future state revenue, it is now only just that building insurance be added to personal tax allowances, up to a maximum of say £250 p a.