In 1904, an American woman named Elizabeth Magie patented a board game. She was a follower of the economist Henry George, who believed that the value of land, as opposed to the buildings and work on top of it, ought to be taxed above almost everything else. Magie built her game to prove his point. Players would see, in an evening, how the owners of land grew rich doing nothing while everyone else was slowly bled dry.
She called it The Landlord’s Game. It was designed to make you despise landlords.
You know it as Monopoly.
A version of it was later sold to Parker Brothers by a man named Charles Darrow, who took the credit and a fortune. Magie, whose idea it was, was reportedly paid around $500 and written out of the story. The game invented to expose the greed of rent-seeking became the most successful celebration of it ever produced, and a reliable way to fall out with your family at Christmas.
Which is a fittingly ironic history for the idea buried at its heart, because that idea, the land value tax, is suddenly and seriously back on the British table.
Our new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has publicly supported a land value tax since 2010. So this has stopped being a seminar-room curiosity and started being something worth understanding.
Dan Neidle’s Tax Policy Associates recently built a detailed model of what such a tax might look like for England: replacing stamp duty, or stamp duty and council tax together, with an annual charge based on the value of the land a property sits on.
In principle, it’s an elegant thing. Land can’t be hidden, moved offshore, or invented. Taxing it doesn’t discourage anyone from working or building a business. And it captures the windfalls that owners did nothing to earn, the decades of rising value that arrived while they simply lived there. Economists of very different politics have admired the idea for over a century, precisely because it’s so hard to argue with on paper.
Neidle’s model suggests that in its cleanest form, roughly two-thirds of homes would pay less than they do under council tax, with stamp duty gone entirely. Put like that, it sounds like a reform most of the country would vote for tomorrow.
Then you look at who makes up the other third.
The substantial increases, on Neidle’s own figures, cluster in London and the South East. Which is to say, here. The bills that rise are disproportionately the bills of people living in exactly the counties we work across: Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent.
And inside that sits a harder problem still. A land value tax is charged on the value of your land, not on your income. Neidle is admirably honest about the group this hurts most: people who own a valuable home but don’t have the income to match. The retired couple whose house has quietly quadrupled in value over thirty years while their pension has done nothing of the sort. Asset-rich, income-limited, and handed an annual bill calculated from the first of those and payable only out of the second.
None of which makes the idea wrong, and it’s worth being fair here. Neidle publishes the ugly results next to the elegant ones: the transitional unfairness, the effects on house prices in both directions, the sheer difficulty of valuing every plot of land in England. It reads as an honest attempt to find out what would really happen, not a campaign for or against.
But the beautiful theory and the arrival day are different animals. And this is one of those rare reforms where the thing being modelled isn’t something that happens to other people somewhere else. For a great many people in our corner of the country, it would mean a larger bill, and for some, a bill that’s genuinely difficult to pay.
It is, for now, a model and a proposal, not a law. There is nothing here to do, and plenty of ways it could change beyond recognition or never happen at all. But it’s worth keeping an eye on, in a way most tax stories aren’t, because for once the reform on the drawing board has our address on it.
Lizzie Magie wanted her game to start an argument about land. A hundred and twenty years on, it finally might.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent plan around the tax system as it is, while keeping half an eye on the one that might be coming. It’s a good part of the job.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. It describes a proposal that is not law and may never become law. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and is based on current legislation, which can change.