Mansion Tax: what a ludicrous performance

Guido has a “full guide” to how one may challenge / delay / confound the new Mansion Tax, for owners of houses worth more than £2m who stand to be charged starting in April 2028.  It’s a 32-bullet list of steps one might take, many of them just can-kicking wheezes of greater or lesser cunning, culminating in last-ditch engagement with HMRC’s formal complaint procedures: 

Complain about conduct. The Valuation Office runs a two-tier complaints process aiming to answer each tier within 20 working days[1]. After that you can go to the Adjudicator’s Office. 

Ingenious?  Hmm.  Maybe if yours is a borderline case – but there must be a goodly proportion where none of this stands a snowball’s chance in Hell of fending the taxman off.

HOWEVER: if everyone embarked on the Guido prevarication programme, the demands it would make on HMRC bandwidth would be phenomenal.  Why on earth have Healey and Reed gone down this tortuous route?  Do they not recall how Heseltine introduced Council Tax, replete with the need for tens of millions of valuations, into several categories (rather than just two, +/- £2m), in mere months?  Answer (for younger readers): he just commissioned local estate agents in each area, with an appeals process after the event.  Simples!  And wholly efficacious for getting the show on the road (pace, anyone that was genuinely hard done by and still nurses an unresolved grievance – but I don’t believe there were many).  And that was before Zoopla / Google Maps etc.  

So, why have they done it?  Let me answer my own question.  They are stupid.  It’s all to do with being confident (and intelligent) enough to say don’t be so daft, Humphrey.  

ND 

PS – declaration of interest: no, Schloss Drew will not fall into the >£2m bracket.

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[1]  20 working days?  Yeah, right.  I speak as one who has tried that route, on a completely different matter.  It took 8 weeks to get any response whatsoever, and that was not at all definitive.  Nor was it  on an issue that impacted on remotely as many people (maybe 20-30) as mansion tax will (maybe 150,000, all at the same time).  It’s simply that HMRC is (a) understaffed; (b) a law unto itself; (c) shameless.  The longest gap I have encountered between HMRC communications on a single issue has been 14 (fourteen) years (sic): and they didn’t apologise for the egregious hiatus.