MAKE THE BUILDING GIANTS PAY!
As families face £15bn bill for safe homes after Grenfell, ministers consider £2bn levy on developers
Rishi sunak was urged yesterday to resist calls to introduce a property tax amid fears it would be a wealth tax in all but name.
Treasury officials have modelled a plan to scrap council tax and stamp duty and replace them with a property tax based on a percentage of a home’s value.
The scheme would be revenue-neutral, meaning it would not bring in any more money for the Treasury.
But it could see winners in northern areas and losers in the south, where property prices are higher.
One economist said there was a danger that it could become a ‘creeping wealth tax’, while another said it could be devastating for cash-poor pensioners who live in valuable homes.
Professor Philip Booth, from the University of Buckingham, said: ‘Property taxes in the UK are high by international standards. They are also appallingly designed. it is important that property taxes overall do not rise.’
he added: ‘stamp duty and council tax must both be abolished. This must not be a creeping wealth tax.’
iain McCluskey, a tax partner at the consultancy firm PwC, said: ‘The challenge that a change like this throws up is that, depending on where someone lives, you might have a person in the south East or London who has lived in their house for a long time, and that house has now become very valuable, but they may be a pensioner or not have a very high income.
‘That’s because this is not a tax on liquid assets, like money you are actually receiving, but rather on illiquid assets – where you have to pay whether you have got the money or not.
‘so i think the Chancellor would struggle to make something like this work
‘Struggle to make this fair’
and make it fair. Just because someone lives in an area like the south East, it does not mean they have the wealth or income to pay taxes like that.’
Mr sunak is understood to be resisting the property tax idea, and there is no prospect of it being introduced in the Budget on March 3.
The Budget is expected to announce an extension of Government support for those hit by the pandemic, including the furlough and business loan schemes. The cut to stamp duty, which is due to end in March, could also be extended.
But the Budget could include moves such as an increase in corporation tax. Mr sunak is said to believe it is the fairest way to begin raising significant sums because it targets business profits rather than people and firms who have been plunged into the red.
in what is understood to be a coded reference to raising taxes, a senior Whitehall source told The sunday Times. ‘Things would have to go pretty badly wrong for us not to begin some consolidation in the Budget.’
Under the proposal, council tax and stamp duty would be replaced with a ‘proportional property tax’ levied on the existing values of homes. Council tax is based on property valuations from 1991.
such a move would be controversial because people in the south with expensive homes would pay more.
however, supporters of the plan say it will benefit voters in the ‘Red Wall’ seats in the North the Tories won from Labour in 2019. They also say scrapping stamp duty would remove the barrier to families trading up to a bigger home and elderly people in large houses downsizing.
The consultancy WPi Economics is calculating the winners and losers in all English constituencies. it said that in Mr sunak’s constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, 97 per cent of households would be better off, on average by £650 a year.
WPi claims the tax would raise the same as council tax and stamp duty if it is set at 0.48 per cent of the value of a home. so someone with a £150,000 house would pay £720 a year. But a family in a £1million house would have to pay £4,800 a year. The average band D council tax in England for 2020/21 is £1,818.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘in principle i’d be willing to look at it because council tax is not working and stamp duty is detrimental to the housing market.’
Last night the think- tank Onward called for cuts in the lower council tax bands to boost northern areas and help ‘level up’ the nation. it said council tax in London was the lowest per head despite high property prices.
BIG building firms face a multibillion-pound levy to help families pay to repair homes with dangerous cladding in the wake of the Grenfell fire.
It could a mean a levy on all high rise flats and possibly a separate charge on major developments to atone for building tens of thousands of flats and homes with unsafe cladding and insulation in recent decades.
It is part of a package of measures being discussed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick to meet Britain’s estimated £15billion post- Grenfell repair bill. The levy could raise up to £200million a year – a total of £2billion over ten years.
The inquiry into the 2017 Grenfell fire in Kensington, west London, in which 72 people died, has exposed how hundreds of apartment blocks were built which do not comply with safety regulations. The Government has said developers and building owners should fix the safety crisis, but leasehold law means residents in the flats must foot the bill.
Ministers are considering two annual levies to ease the financial burden on leaseholders:
Adapting the existing ‘community infrastructure levy’ whereby developers pay to improve the community in return for planning permission.
A special ‘ gateway levy’ whereby developers would pay a levy on new high rise blocks of flats.
It would meet demands by campaigners, backed by the Daily Mail, to stop big developers shirking their responsibility.
Significantly, the proposal is advocated by fire and building safety minister Lord Greenhalgh, who is also responsible for the Grenfell inquiry.
Lord Greenhalgh, a close personal and political ally of Boris Johnson and who served as his deputy when he was London mayor, said: ‘A generation of people have built buildings that are not fit for purpose. In recent years developers have made profits of between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. Of course they should step in and do the right thing. The solution will include a levy on the development community.’
He said paying a levy would help developers regain the public trust needed to carry on in business.
A Government source added: ‘A levy is in keeping with “the polluter pays” principle. We may not be able to hold the industry legally responsible, but we can hold it morally responsible and make it contribute to putting things right.’
Ministers have dismissed London mayor Sadiq Khan’s call for a massive one-off ‘windfall tax’ on developers as impractical, mainly on the grounds that it would put some building firms out of business.
The say an annual levy would raise far more in the long run without damaging the industry.
It is expected to be part of a wider package including a Government loan, and additional taxpayer support, to end the fire risk in millions of homes.
Making building owners and developers pay to fix the safety crisis has been a mantra of ministers ever since Grenfell. But the Government has shown little willingness to force the companies to pay, until now. Some developers have put money towards repairs, but nothing close to the amount needed to save some leaseholders from potential bankruptcy.
As the Mail has revealed, the biggest housebuilders have made more than £15billion in profit since Grenfell, allowing them to pay shareholders dividends of £5billion.
Since 2008, they have also benefited from billions of pounds of public subsidy via Help to Buy and Shared Ownership schemes.
But hundreds of apartment blocks have been built that do not comply with new fire regulations.
Britain’s most profitable housebuilder, Persimmon, commissioned an independent review which found in 2019 that it had a ‘systemic nationwide problem’ with fire stops in its timber-frame properties. Responding at the time, the developer said it would now ‘prioritise the customer over the pure profit motive’. A separate investigation by the BBC in 2019 found that new-build homes constructed by Persimmon and Bellway Homes were sold with missing or defective fire breaks, which are designed to stop the spread of a blaze. The companies said they were addressing
the issue.
PHIL Spector created the greatest pop music ever recorded. Hear his songs once and their dense, immense sound, layered with countless harmonies, is unforgettable – Be My Baby by The Ronettes or River Deep, Mountain High by Ike and Tina Turner.
Of all the giant hits throughout the Sixties produced by Spector, with his hallmark ‘Wall of Sound’, perhaps the finest is You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ by the Righteous Brothers.
Spector, who died yesterday aged 81 from complications linked to a Covid infection, has been acknowledged in the music business for six decades as a genuine genius.
Yet for almost as long, he has been regarded as the most hated man in pop: a thug, a bullying control freak, an alcoholic, a gun nut, a monster... and a murderer. When he died, he was serving a jail sentence of 19 years to life for the killing of an actress at his California home.
Spector claimed Lana Clarkson was playfully kissing the barrel of his revolver when it was accidentally discharged, in 2003. A pathologist found bruising on the 40-year- old’s tongue, indicating the weapon was forced into her mouth. After a murder hearing ended in a mistrial in 2007, Spector was found guilty two years later of second degree murder, the US term for manslaughter.
Few who knew the producer were surprised. He had a reputation for gunplay in the recording studio, threatening musicians and stars at pistol point if they failed to obey his instructions to the note.
Songwriter Leonard Cohen, who recorded with Spector in 1977, said that during one late-night session, an argument about the phrasing of a line became so acrimonious that the producer marched out of his booth and held a gun to Cohen’s head until he performed it to his liking.
That wasn’t the only time the Canadian singer and poet found himself a heartbeat away from being shot. On another night, Spector weaved across the studio with a pistol in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. He flung an arm across Cohen’s shoulder, pulled him tight and shoved the gun barrel against his neck. ‘I love you, Leonard,’ he said. ‘I hope you do,’ Cohen replied. Cohen was not the only one unnerved by the svengali’s habit of pointing weapons at anyone who displeased him, included John Lennon and The Ramones.
Lennon was recording his 1975 covers album Rock ‘n’ Roll when Spector pulled his revolver from its hip holster and fired a shot inches from the ex-Beatle’s head, into the control room ceiling. A shaken Lennon snapped: ‘Phil, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. But don’t f*** with my ears. I need them.’
Punk bass player Dee Dee Ramone tried to leave the studio after a 12-hour session during which Spector refused to record anything but one chord, played endlessly. The producer aimed his revolver at the bassist’s chest – then deftly stripped and reassembled the gun without ever breaking eye contact.
It sometimes seemed that Spector
had pulled a gun on every leading artiste in the business. When Blondie’s Debbie Harry approached him about producing a comeback album for her, he took out a handgun, stuck it into the top of her boot and said: ‘Bang!’ After that, Harry said, she couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.
Spector claimed his obsession with firearms began in his teens, after he was beaten up by a gang.
The guns were for protection, he said. But that was far too simple an answer for a man of deep and complex insecurities, who wore two-inch heels to boost his 5’5” height and took medication for schizophrenia even though he had not been diagnosed with the illness.
Days before the killing of Lana Clarkson, he gave his first interview for 25 years and blamed his mental instability on the fact that his parents were first cousins. ‘I would say I’m probably relatively insane, to an extent,’ he said. ‘I have a bipolar personality which is strange. I’m my own worst enemy.’
Born in New York on Boxing Day, 1940, he moved with his family to Los Angeles as a toddler. Tragedy struck when he was eight: his father Ben set off for work as usual one morning, but pulled off the road, fed a hosepipe from the exhaust to the driver’s window, and gassed himself to death.
Ben’s gravestone bore the words: ‘To know him was to love him’. Lying in bed and grieving, the boy heard the line in his mind as the refrain of a song. He formed a high school rock ‘n’ roll band, The Teddy Bears, and recorded it, landing his first No1 hit in 1958. The song became a cover favourite, recorded by artists from Nancy Sinatra and Emmylou Harris to The Beatles and Amy Winehouse.
SPECTOR sang harmonies on that original version, but he soon realised his talent was for shaping sounds, not making them. After a brief career as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter (co-writing Spanish Harlem, a hit for Cliff Richard and Ben E King), he set up a record company to develop his distinctive, symphonic soundscape – a densely-packed tsunami of music, as if three orchestras and a choir were combining.
Soon he was a phenomenon, the producer as star-maker, dubbed ‘the first tycoon of teen’ by journalist Tom Wolfe.
He began with The Crystals, a gospel-influenced girl group with a string of hits: He’s A Rebel, Da Doo Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me.
Aged 22, he signed The Ronettes.
Their lead singer was a statuesque woman with beehive hair and eyeliner like an Egyptian queen. Her name was Ronnie Bennett and Spector became obsessed with her. They recorded Be My Baby, the song becoming mixed up with the producer’s all-consuming sexual passion for the singer. In bed, he kept leaping up every two minutes and 45 seconds, to put the single on again.
Ronnie didn’t realise at first that Spector was already married, to Annette Merar. When she noticed women’s clothes at his home, he told her they belonged to his sister.
He insisted on keeping their affair secret, which caused an embarrassing incident at a New York hotel when the house detective assumed Ronnie was a prostitute and tried to throw her out.
A ferociously jealous man, Spector landed The Ronettes a gig as the support act on a Rolling Stones tour – then forced the band’s management to sign legal papers pledging that Mick Jagger and the other Stones would not fraternise or even speak with the girl band.
Ronnie eventually married Spector in 1968 after divorcing his first wife – when his greatest success was already over – and his eccentricities were multiplying.
His Wall of Sound reached its zenith with You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ and another Righteous Brothers classic, Unchained Melody (though pop historians argue over whether he really did produce that song, originally destined to be a B-side).
When River Deep, Mountain High by the Turners flopped on its first release in 1966, an aggrieved Spector retreated to his Hollywood mansion, filling it with memorabilia. For most of the rest of his life, he favoured early- Sixties styles, including a velvet jacket and elevator boots.
He wore toupees and, following a car accident that threw him through the windscreen and left his scalp scarred, a series of bizarre wigs fixed in place with extra- strong glue. At night, Ronnie said, the bedroom reeked of solvent. Ronnie was forbidden to have friends. He kept her ‘as a beautiful object,’ said one friend. She couldn’t bear children, so he ordered her to wear a cushion under her dress and fake pregnancies, before adopting three babies including a pair of twins.
Their nine-bedroom house, known as Pyrenees Castle, was surrounded by chain- link fences, with guard dogs roaming the grounds. On rare occasions when she was allowed out alone, she had to keep a mannequin dressed up as Spector on the passenger seat of her car – to deter rapists, he said.
After a terrifying row in 1972, she announced she was going shopping with her mother. Instead she dashed to LA airport and took the first flight to New York. ‘I knew if I didn’t leave, I was going to die there,’ she said. Spector went on to marry again, briefly, in the Eighties.
DESPITE his unhinged behaviour, many musicians regarded him as a mercurial genius. In 1968, John Lennon and George Harrison asked him to dust his magic brush over the disjointed Let It Be sessions – although Paul McCartney never did forgive Spector for over-dubbing a full orchestra on to his ballad, The Long And Winding Road.
Stories of his strangeness became legend. One journalist, invited to his house, was shown into a blacked- out room by a servant and told to wait. The man sat in darkness for two hours, until he could stand it no longer and opened a curtain.
The first chink of light revealed Spector in an armchair. He had been there, motionless and silent, the whole time.
In 2003, he met an out-of-work actress at the House of Blues club in Hollywood and tried to befriend her, plying her with drink. She told him her name was Lana, that she was a Marilyn Monroe fan, that she was six feet tall, that she had a bit part in the Al Pacino movie, Scarface. They went back to his mansion.
Previous visitors to the house later told the trial that Spector sometimes tried to prevent people from leaving by force, locking doors and waving guns.
Exactly how Lana died will never be known, but Spector called a friend in panic and said: ‘I think I killed somebody.’
The first trial, at which the producer was represented by a ‘dream team’ of attorneys and forensics experts from the OJ Simpson trial, ended in deadlock, with the jury divided. During the hearing, Spector sported a huge Afro hairstyle.
At the second, which lasted six months, he opted for a blond Beatle wig. The jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to a minimum of 19 years. Yet that was not the end of his bizarrely intertwined romances and musical career.
In 2003, shortly after killing Miss Clarkson, he met a 22year-old waitress and aspiring singer called Rachelle Short. He attempted to launch her as a star and, when that failed, made her his fourth wife in 2006.
After he was jailed, she went on an alleged spending spree that included a private plane, an Aston Martin and a Ferrari, jewellery and properties. Spector filed for divorce in 2016 and agreed to put Pyrenees Castle up for sale at £4million, splitting the proceeds with his ex.
Their divorce was finalised in 2019. The house where Lana Clarkson died is still on the market.