Edited by Peter Bill
Published 2004 (ISBN: 1 902488 78 4) Price £9.95
This monograph considers the policy proposals that seem best able to meet the recommendation made in the Barker Review, that “government should use a tax measure to extract some of the windfall gain that accrues to landowners from the sale of their land for residential development.” As is pointed out in the monograph, there have been three serious attempts since 1948 to impose a super-tax on the jump in the value of land bestowed by the grant of development permission, all of which failed. On the other hand, it is becoming clear that not only is there a need to generate the funding required for the wide range of infrastructure of high quality necessary for sustainable communities, at the right time in the development cycle, but there is also a need to reform the complex Section 106 system. And the good news is that there seems (with one exception) to be a consensus amongst the authors of the monograph that some form – or forms – of a new development land tax, along with a simplification of Section 106 agreements, is worth pursuing.