Resistance is Phutile

Inheritance tax.

Heard about the law stating that if a property is left uninhabited for six months, the local council can rent it out to whoever they please?

As legal owner of the property, you get to keep the rent from the house your dear old parents brought you up in.

Such generosity.

Still, it has to be said, you might not like the idea of having no say over what sort of person is moved into the gaff.

Wait, that sounds silly.

You're far more likely to be extremely pissed off at the fact that somebody is being moved in in the first place.

I tried to imagine myself in this same situation. If my parents had passed away and left me a house they'd bought with a life time's worth of hard work, how would I feel if the government moved a bunch of homeless crackheads in six months and two days later?

It's not hard to argue against keeping a property standing unused while many in the community wait in queue for a roof. But six months is surely not long enough to have decided on what is to be done with a house and sold it, moved into it, rented it, or whatever after the death of a loved one. I would have thought a period of two years more suitable to be honest.

Particularly when there are so many examples of local councils leaving properties empty for years with no effort towards renovating them and filling them with the needy.

The thing is, from a personal point of view, I would like to be able to provide those who need it with a roof over their heads. But is a lifetime of your benefactor's hard work yours to give?

Instead of this law, I would propose a situation similar to the organ donor system, where we could decide before our deaths whether our properties could be appropriated by the local council after a fixed period, so long as our relatives retained ownership. The stipulation: this system be introduced in exchange for the abolition of the inheritance tax.

posted by Phu @ 11:09 am