I just wrote in the Sunday Times about the political and economic case for a land value tax. I think the principled argument for LVT is compelling, and our (likely) next Prime Minister has supported it for many years.1 The challenge is the detail – and wrapped up in that is who wins and who loses. So this article is not about the case for land value tax. It’s about the detail: how a land value tax would work in practice, and what the key design questions are. It includes a simplified model of how a land value tax could apply to English residential property.
Coming later today, Sunday 12 July, will be a model of how LVT will work, showing the impact across the country and in each local authority.
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Many thanks to B and K for help with the modelling and coding.
Contains HM Land Registry data, and ONS, VOA and MHCLG data, © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The interactive map is built with Leaflet; basemap tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO.
Image of the UK from space, ESA — European Space Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence.
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Footnotes
In his own 2010 Guardian article he proposed an annual tax on the market rental value of land that would permit abolition of stamp duty, calling it “aspirational socialism”; a 2022 LBC interview described LVT as “a very productive form of taxation” that could discourage land hoarding; and at his 22 May 2026 Makerfield launch he said he had “long been persuaded of the argument for a Land Value Tax”, while describing council tax as “highly regressive” and its 1991 valuations as “not justifiable”. But Burnham has also supported Fairer Share‘s tax on the whole value of property, which is not LVT. There’s a good CIOT article on Andy Burnham’s tax positions. ↩︎
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