§ MR. SEARS (Cheltenham)To ask the Secretary to the Treasury if he will give a statement of the agency, local and: Government, engaged in the assessment and collection of land tax, the amount received from this source for the last complete year, the cost of collection and the amount redeemed during the last twenty years; will he state the duties of Land Tax Commissioners; whether they employ clerks: if so, what their duties are and the money paid to them for their services; the object served by a Land Registry in Somerset House; and whether there is a similar registry for quit-rent in Ireland.
(Answered by Mr. McKenna.) The amount received from the land tax during the year 1905–6 was £722,960, and I am informed that the amount redeemed during the past twenty years was £91,817. It is not possible, however, to distinguish the cost of collection of this part of the revenue from the general cost of collecting the proceeds of the income-tax and the inhabited house duty. The remuneration paid to the clerks to the Commissioners of 84 Land Tax varies from a few shillings to about £100 a year. Up till 1892 these clerks were paid poundage, but the first section of the Taxes (Regulation of Remuneration) Act, 1891, fixed their salaries at a sum not less than the amount of poundage received by them in each case during the year beginning 6th April, 1890. There is no land registry at Somerset House, nor in Dublin, but there is a branch in the Inland Revenue Department which deals with redemption and other matters relating to land tax, and there is a quit-rent office in Dublin under the direction of the Commissioners of Woods, where rentals are kept containing particulars of the quit-rents payable to the Crown for lands in Ireland. For further information perhaps I may refer the hon. Member to the twenty-eighth Annual Report of the Board of Inland Revenue. (Cd. 4,474 of 1885.)