Council tax is certainly unfair but supporters of the Is it Fair? campaign against the tax should think more carefully about the implications of what they are proposing.
The Is it Fair? group is advocating local income tax, supposedly based on "ability to pay". One must wonder about the independence of the campaigners, as Is if Fair? appears to be a carbon copy of the Liberal Democrats' Axe The Tax campaign.
It is absurd to imagine that income, as declared to the Inland Revenue, is a measure of ability to pay tax. This ignores the reality of legal avoidance, tax havens, evasion and crime.
Replacing the council tax with local income tax would reinforce the evils of the present tax system, which penalises hard-working families while rewarding benefit scroungers and criminals.
This gives entirely the wrong message to young people and is gradually corroding the moral foundations of society.
A local income tax would also be an administrative nightmare. Given the Inland Revenue's well-publicised problems with tax credits, anything which makes the system more complicated should be shunned like the plague.
Nor should we ignore the cost of collection; the present tax system costs the country more than £25 billion a year just to run. The same objections apply to local sales taxes, which could mean different branches of the same chain store charging different prices for the same goods - we could end up with cross-border trafficking between Brighton and Shoreham!
The council tax certainly needs to be replaced by a fairer property tax - one based on site values alone.
-Henry Law, Brighton
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