This isn’t accidental. It’s the logical outcome of treating housing as a commodity first, and a home second.

It has to stop!

#TaxWealthNotWork #WealthInequality

Then HMOs exploded post-2008. Cheap credit, stagnant wages, and rising rents made shared housing the default for millions.

The impact?
- Family homes carved up
- Streets hollowed out
- Tenants churned every 6–12 months
- Councils scrambling to regulate what they once enabled

The private rental market boom started with Thatcher, but successive UK governments helped with.
- Tax relief on mortgage interest
- Capital gains exemptions
- No wealth tax
- Right to Buy without replacement
- Planning loopholes for conversions

Today a house is not about shelter, instead it's about stacking returns. Room-by-room rental, diversified income, regulatory arbitrage. An investment asset in bricks and mortar.

But we didn’t just financialise housing. We then built derivatives on top of it. Enter the HMO: one house, sliced into rentable units, engineered for yield.

Figures are approximate, representative figures drawn from a combination of UK Ministry of Justice historical data series and House of Commons Library briefings that show the broad trend rather than exact annual counts.

9. Exit Tax for Wealth Leaving UK
- Tax unrealized gains when assets move abroad
- Prevents tax avoidance via relocation

10. Investment Allowance Reform
- Encourage productive investment while taxing gains fairly
- Supports growth alongside equity

7. Inheritance Tax Reform
- Close loopholes like the “death uplift”
- Ensures fairer taxation of inherited wealth

8. Scrap Non-Dom Tax Status
- End special tax privileges for wealthy foreign residents
- Already underway, but full removal boosts fairness

5. 4% Tax on Share Buybacks
- Discourages profit hoarding, boosts real investment
- Raises £0.1–£2B/year (up to £9B over a parliament)

6. Permanent Windfall Tax on Oil & Gas
- Extend and strengthen excess profits tax
- Revenue varies, but significant

3. Close Carried Interest Loophole
- Tax private equity profits like regular income
- Raises £510M/year

4. National Insurance on Investment Income
- Apply NI to dividends, rent, savings interest
- Adds £10.2B/year

1. Wealth Tax on £10M+ Assets
- 2% annual tax on assets over £10 million
- Targets ~20,000 people, raises up to £24B/year

2. Capital Gains Tax Overhaul
- Align CGT rates with income tax, close loopholes
- Adds £12B/year beyond current reforms

We've got significant idle capacity, inflation is moderate so, print baby print.... Just this time spend it on areas that indirectly help real people for longer than a furlough scheme did directly and, make sure to model the flows of wealth so you bring the money back into the exchequer!

🇬🇧 UK proposals model what a broader, simpler wealth tax could do, with fewer exemptions, higher asset values & full compliance assumed so, estimates reach £10–25 bn.

🇪🇸 Spain’s wealth tax raises billions, not tens of billions as it kicks in above €3 m, exempts homes & large chunks of wealth, and many regions apply big discounts. It raises about €1.5–2 bn a year.

🧭 In short: Opening more North Sea wells wouldn’t meaningfully cut UK energy prices.

It’s mostly a political narrative, not an economically sound strategy.

Any new gas would still be sold at global prices, and would take years to reach market!

🌍 5. Climate & economic trade-off. The economic case is weak too: new projects take 5–10 years before gas flows, so they won’t help current bills.

It’s also more cost-effective to invest in insulation, renewables, and demand reduction, which directly lower bills and emissions.

📉 4. Effect on energy prices

Even if we drilled more:

The volume added would be small relative to the global market.

That means no meaningful change to wholesale prices.

Household energy costs are driven by those wholesale prices and transmission costs, not where the gas comes from.

🛢️ 3. About half of UK gas demand is met from the North Sea. The rest is imported (mainly via Norway and LNG terminals).

Gas produced in UK waters often gets exported, swapped, or resold, depending on what’s profitable that day.
The market is fluid we can’t ringfence “British gas” for British homes.

💰 2. Even if the UK produced more gas it would still be sold on global markets, typically priced according to international benchmarks (like the Dutch TTF or the UK’s NBP hub).

The private companies extracting it are under no obligation to sell it domestically or at a discount.