UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we've heard it all before Over summer, the UK witnessed a change in government. However, the incoming Labour Party shares some ideas about regulation and innovation with its Conservative predecessor. Earlier this week, the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) launched the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), which it said would "reduce …
Eric Pickles also pledged to get rid of it 2010:
"Breaking free from council red tape. My department wants to free up councils to deliver for the public. I won't be micromanaging or interfering any more"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/06/local-government-public-power-councils
Pickles hated the local government sector and did his best to destroy it. It's when councils started having their real terms funding *really* cut. The preferred alternative being, of course, outsourcing to private sector companies who knew exactly the right thing to do for residents. Arconic, Carrillion, Barnet's "EasyCouncil" model, etc. etc.
This will cause an explosion of jobs and innovation. Remove the overhead to run business, so that anyone could become rich from providing services. No income tax, no corporate tax, no lawyers and accountants producing zero tangible GDP. No government spending on regulation, tracking, tax collection, prosecution etc. And it is impossible not to pay the land tax. You cannot hide it in offshores.
Less than 1% of population owns 50% of England [1]. 18% of England is owned by corporations, some of them based overseas or in offshore jurisdictions. But military and police to protect this land is probably paid from poor workers' taxes.
Home owners own only 5% of the country. Suddenly housing issue will be solved and people will not spend most of their earnings to find a place to live, instead spending on consumption.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author
Taxing land wouldn't work; it would bankrupt the people who look after land that is hard to farm, creating an incentive to build on some beautiful sections of countryside to pay a tax bill. It would also push leasehold rates through the roof, affecting a lot of less well off people.
Much better to bring in a flat rate of income tax, applying to all income. (i.e. same rate of tax on income from shares, dividends interest payments, selling land and property etc.) That would actually impact people with the most assets the most, because the act of converting the assets into money that can be spent is income, and would be taxed as such. Getting rid of the tax bands and going flat rate for all income rewards people for working more and takes money away from people living off inherited assets. (Of course, that's why a tax scheme like that will never happen...)
> it would bankrupt the people who look after land that is hard to farm
No, because land should be taxed based on its productive qualities.
> leasehold rates through the roof, affecting a lot of less well off people
Would you mind to explain how it works? The poor will become better off overall due to better economy. Besides they do not own any land.
> better to bring in a flat rate
This would hit the poor for sure.
There are two separate things here: unified tax rates across all income, and a flat tax rate. It's the unified rates across all kinds of income that rewards people who work for a living at the expense of those living off assets. There can still be tiered bands. A flat tax rate rewards those with higher income at the expense of those with lower income.
Here's a question about unified treatment of all income. Would you include inheritance? I.e., get rid of inheritance tax as applied to estates, and instead treat what's received by the heirs as part of their income, taxing it at that point? It seems like this could encourage people to will their estates in a more egalitarian way, wider and more thinly, but maybe there are unintended consequences. You might still need to keep some allowances, like residence nil rate for a family home or business relief for a family business, so they wouldn't have to be chopped into tiny slices or taxed out of existence.
Interesting, but as flawed as any other measure such as the "window tax". Approximately 70% of the UK's land is farms and parks. Look forward to prices for food and recreational amenities rising.
My land is half house, half garden. Could I sell the garden to build another house? Or better, high-rise flats so all the flat owners share the land tax between them? Of course I can, without those pesky planning permission and safety regulations getting in the way!
>” My land is half house, half garden. Could I sell the garden to build another house?”
Half hearted, sell both and build two high-rise flats then you will have all the benefits of a penthouse apartment and roof garden…
Only constraint, you are banned from living anywhere else, so as to ensure you get the full benefit of your investment…
>” Remove the overhead to run business, so that anyone could become rich from providing services.”
That is effectively what cloud has done!
I move my datacentre into “the cloud” and get rid of the building; no longer paying rent or business rates.
Do online sales and can downsize high street presence…
Yes the cloud provider is paying business rates, but I doubt the level of business rates placed on a data centre is anything other than significantly less than the business rates orignally paid by all those businesses pre-cloud….
Implementation of the proposed taxation change should happen slowly over a longer period of time.
People concerned of not being able to pay the land tax after retirement could simply save in advance from their (now untaxed) income. Alternatively they can move out to areas with cheaper land and let the productive space available to younger generations.
The UK is a rentier economy - there's a better RoI and lower risk if you simply buy property in most instances than investing in R&D/whatever. Been like that for near enough half a century so until that changes then the rest is bollox.
Oh and I'm talking about the actual companies themselves, not the plague of buy-to-let scum which have emerged in the last two decades.
> lower risk if you simply buy property
I am still waiting for my taxes back for bailing out property owners during the 2008 crisis. Now that the owners are doing great, pay the f-ng debt!
So it is not that the risk of buying property is magically lower, but making the taxpayer to bail them out is where the risk is reassigned.
>” Hinton's career trajectory is suggestive of the malaise affecting UK innovation, which has little to do with regulation. His Wikipedia page states that though he gained a PhD at the University of Sussex, he left the UK after finding it difficult to get funding for his work”
Hinton left the UK circa 1980 (*), when the UK had a government that didn’t believe in funding scientific R&D and also didn’t believe in paying universities and researchers more than a pittance. Hence UK researchers were prime targets for the well funded US research universities, thus the “the brain drain”…
Thatcher’s/Conservative response was the UK could not afford to compete, so Thatcher used her relationship with Reagan to block the movement of GB passport holding researchers (and high profile individuals) to the US and simply wrung her hands as UK universities lost out on funding, complaining that they needed to become”world class”…
We did (briefly) have a period (David Cameron PM?) when the UK government activity encouraged foreign investment in the development of R&D capabilities in the UK, and thus encourage researchers to return to the UK, but subsequent events seem to indicate the establishment hasn’t taken this on-board, reverting to form
(*) https://web.archive.org/web/20200801050640/https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/fullcv.pdf
Coincidentally, I was watching the House of Lords Covid Vaccine Rollout committee (Parliament channel, last night).
Oxford vaccine boffins were being asked about their views on progress towards better planning for the next pandemic. Besides some rather tart opinions on various Government initiatives, they all agreed that the parlous state of UK funding (and high living costs) meant that talent is going to the US and Japan, not coming here.
No way that the AI could hallucinate a nonexistent organ, or an actual organ in the wrong place.
Some people do have their organs in "the wrong place" (when a friend had appendicitis they couldn't find it at first because it was round the back), so that might actually be helpful (within reason). It's a generation of surgeons skilled in removing inflamed Shatner's Bassoons from people that's the worrying bit.
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