HOUSE TAX.—RESOLUTION. (Hansard, 5 April 1870)

MR. ALDERMAN W. LAWRENCE,
in rising to move— That the House Tax is unequally and unfairly assessed, imposes unnecessary restrictions upon the construction of buildings specially adapted for the working classes, and ought to be repealed, said, he was anxious to bring the subject before the House previous to the Chancellor of the Exchequer's statement on Monday next. The house tax was a rare example of a tax that had once been repealed., being re-imposed with all its former restrictions, regulations, and anomalies. It was abolished in 1834; but in 1851, when the window tax was remitted, the house tax, moderated in amount, was re-imposed. Many people thought the duty applied only to those who had good incomes and occupied good houses; but it really pressed heavily on the working classes in London and other large towns. The price of land was rising every day, and the result was, instead of a number of small houses being built covering a large space of ground, it was necessary to build larger houses, which were occupied, room by room, by working men and their families. These houses, being rated at more than £20 a year, were liable to the duty of 9d. in the pound, and the landlords in order to recoup themselves were compelled to charge 1s. in the pound upon the tenants who occupied their rooms. Not only did the tax in such cases lead to an increase of rent, but it interfered materially with the construction of houses intended for the use of the working classes. In the nine blocks of houses 1375 built by Sir Sydney Waterlow's company, where the proportion of rent to the wages of the tenants was exactly one-fifth, and the average rent of each of the 819 families occupying rooms was 5s. 8½d. a week, the buildings were rated to the property tax at £8,628, and the house tax, which upon this assessment amounted to £310 8s. 6d. a year, was saved because there was no front door to these dwellings. There was a public staircase, and each tenement had an entrance door from it, and persons who chose to build in this form might avoid payment of the house tax altogether. The Corporation of London had done so; but the tax was paid upon the dwellings erected by Miss Burdett Coutts, and the Peabody Trustees and others, who had not conformed to this plan. There were objectionable features about houses of this kind, arising from the lurking-places afforded by them to persons of bad character, and he believed the police had already declined to take charge of these open staircases on some of the beats. Imagine the Seven Dials with the doors off all the houses in order to save the house tax. The Chancellor of the Exchequer would lose, and extra police would be required. It must be remembered that these large blocks of buildings erected by Sir Sydney Waterlow and others did not meet the requirements of the great mass of the working people, who were compelled to live in inferior dwellings, and to pay their share of the duty. Yet we all professed great anxiety that the working classes should live in houses more conducive to decency and order; and, indeed, the great problem of the day was the better housing of the working classes. We had passed laws enforcing drainage, water supply, &c., and all these things raised rents, increased the difficulty of building separate houses, and rendered it inevitable that the working classes should be accommodated in houses that could be sublet to several tenants. The consequence was that in London and large towns families lived in single rooms, with far less accommodation than was enjoyed by those in the country who were receiving less wages. There were miners and workers in mills who lived in comparatively good houses, because land was cheap. We ought to aim, at providing all families with at least two rooms, and this could be done only by lowering 1376 rents or raising wages—the latter, the House could not do; but they could take of the tax upon those dwellings. We had taken off taxes on food and clothing; but we had taxed lodging until the small-wage class were obliged to live in places that were a disgrace to civilization. The repeal of the house tax would afford a double relief; for not only would the tax be saved, but the removal of the present restrictions would allow houses to be built more convenient for the working classes. The house tax pressed very lightly upon the baronial residences and mansions of the rich, because it was laid upon the amount of rent which it was presumed they would let for; and as most of them could not be let for anything like their value, the tax upon them was only nominal. Houses that had cost £200,000, £300,000, and even £500,000 were rated at only £200, £300, and £500 a year. Two friends of his, who were large merchants in the City, had each built a mansion at the cost of £20,000, and one was rated at £60, and the other at £80 a year; and close by them was the mansion of a noble proprietor who had spent £30,000 in improving it, and he was rated at only £100 a year. These facts justified him in saying that the tax was unequally and unfairly assessed. No doubt the Chancellor of the Exchequer could quote political economists who defended a house tax in the abstract; but who always insisted that it ought to be fairly and equitably assessed; for John Stuart Mill had stated that— The public were justly scandalized on learning that residences like Chatsworth or Belvoir were only rated on an imaginary rent of, perhaps, £200 a year, under the pretext that, owing to the great expense of keeping them up, they would not let for more; probably, indeed, they could not be let even for that, and if the argument were a fair one, they ought not to have been taxed at all. It was true that the tax produced as much as £1,000,000 a year; but the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not better apply a portion of his large surplus than in dealing with it, and relieving the lodgings of the poor from the pressure of this tax, which was abolished in Ireland in 1822. Any attempt to make it equitable or just would most certainly fail. Another grievance was that small manufactories connected with houses were assessed to the tax, while the large manufactories were exempt; and he wondered that the teetotallers had not 1377 taken up the question, because coffee houses paid 9d. in the pound, while public-houses and beer-houses paid only 6d. in the pound. The fact was that Sir Charles Wood, when he removed the window tax in 1851, reimposed the old house tax of 1808, without the slightest care to adapt it to the modern circumstances of the country, or to modify its gross inequalities and remedy its injustice. There was one matter he wished to bring under the notice of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because the idea of that right hon. Gentleman was that the working classes, being exempt from the income tax and some other duties, were lightly taxed. Now, if the subject were discussed from that point of view, he should be able to prove that the working classes paid a larger share to the Revenue in proportion to their incomes in respect of the duties on malt, spirits, tea, sugar, and tobacco than was paid by those whose income amounted to £10,000, £20,000, or £50,000 a year. The hon. Gentleman concluded by moving his Resolution.

§ MR. COLLINS,
in seconding the Resolution, called the attention of the President of the Poor Law Board to the unequal manner in which the value of large houses was assessed. A gentleman's large house in the country, which might have cost £20,000 to build, was often assessed at the ridiculous low sum of £100 a year, because it would not let for more than that sum. This was felt to be a great grievance by tradesmen who had taken large premises for the purpose of carrying on their business, and were assessed at a much higher rate. There ought to be some other mode than the present for computing the value of large mansions, and he would suggest that the occupiers of them might be assessed on the selling value of the premises.

§ MR. STANSFELD
trusted that his hon. Friend the Member for the City of London would not consider him disrespectful if he declined at that late hour to follow him throughout his arguments. The argument of his hon. Friend was to the effect that the house tax was unjust, 1378 unequal, and oppressive in its incidence on the poorer part of the population; but his argument fell far short of that wide and sweeping proposition. The tax, as was stated by the hon. Member, was repealed in 1834 and afterwards re-enacted; but his hon. Friend forgot to state that previous to 1834 the house duty was imposed on houses down to a rental of £10, and that now all houses below the rental of £20 were exempt from the duty. It was well worthy the consideration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer or of the President of the Poor Law Board, whether there might not be some alternative mode of assessing large houses, which were let for a rent not at all representing the interest of the money spent in their erection. With respect to the allegation of the oppressive nature of the house tax—which, at any rate, did not fall on the poor who lived in separate tenements under a £20 rental, he desired to state that in 1832 the house duty and window tax, which might be placed on the same footing, amounted to £1,040,000; whereas the assessment for the house duty in Middlesex was at present not more than £400,000 a year, though the value of property must have increased 300 per cent. The hon. Member did not prove his case by stating that there were some hardships and inequalities in the house duty, because there was hardly a tax not liable to the same objection; but the question was whether, looking at the whole financial system, the house duty was a tax which ought to be first repealed. He believed that Parliament would not be of that opinion, for the tax now objected to by the hon. Member had the merit of falling on occupiers in a very fair proportion to their ability to pay. It was a direct tax, and free from the objections urged against the income tax; and, at any rate, it was not, all things considered, standing first for repeal as a tax falling OIL the labour and industry of the country. For the secrets of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, hon. Members must wait till Monday; but he did not think that, on the whole, the house tax was a bad tax, and he could not hold out to his hon. Friend any hope of its repeal.

MR. ALDERMAN W. LAWRENCE
said, he should not divide the House on the question; but he was quite convinced, that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer attempted to tax equitably the 1379 princely houses and mansions throughout the country, it would be found that the easiest plan was to abolish the tax altogether.