An online petition demanding the reversal of the revisions to buy to let landlords' tax breaks announced in the Budget last month is struggling to clear its first hurdle.
The petition to Parliament, which is entitled 'Reverse the planned tax relief restriction on individual landlords', was set up London-based landlord Ruhal Uddin.
It requires 10,000 signatures to even merit a formal response from the government and needs a full 100,000 to be considered as a possible subject for a parliamentary debate. After a week online and a flurry of initial publicity, it has only around 7,500.
The petition is in response to the announcement by Chancellor George Osborne that tax relief on mortgage interest payments and arrangement fees incurred when taking out buy to let mortgages would be restricted to the basic rate of income tax, currently 20 per cent - even if the individual landlord was liable for the payment of higher levels of income tax. This new measure will be phased in over four years from April 2017.
The online petition claims that “the planned restriction will unfairly target us by preventing us from offsetting costs in the same manner as other sole traders” and cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies as stating that individual landlords are already taxed more heavily than other homeowners.
The petition can be seen here.
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Sole traders offset their costs in the operation of a business. Their business is typically something they get up in the morning to do.
How is buying a property on a speculative basis and letting it out the same?
Landlords have had it too good for too long.
You just betray your ignorance there. Do Housing Associations and councils do nothing? Why do they have staff then to deal with the houses they own and manage? And if 'individual' landlords do nothing what about the limited companies who do the exact same job and are unaffected by the Budget decision? And if, for argument's sake landlords outsourced all their work and had a letting agent manage their houses, how is this different to a 'hands-off' manager of any business? Does their business no longer qualify as being a business because they aren't 'on duty' from 9 to 5 and/or based at the business premises? The whole thing is ridiculous and riddled with contradictions and has only been proposed because landlords are seen as an easy target for hatred. Build more houses! That's the way to deal with the fact that there are not enough houses. Duh.
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