Mansion Tax one of first acts by Labour Government

Mansion tax to start on day one

Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, has said that he hoped that the 100,000 people with the most expensive properties worth more than £2m  would start to pay the Mansion Tax levy in the 2015-16 financial year. The tax would be included in his first Budget so the £1.2bn a year it would raise could be injected immediately into the NHS.

Labour has pledged to spend £2.5bn more on the NHS than the Conservatives. The rest of the funding would come from a levy on tobacco firms and reducing tax avoidance by hedge funds.

Under Labour’s plans nobody whose house was worth less than £2m today would pay it because the valuations would be fixed to this autumn. Only those on the 40p higher income tax rate will have to pay the tax. Others will be able to defer it until when the property is sold or they died.