LVT will make farming more efficient and viable

Currently, farming in Britain is highly dependent on subsidies in one form or another. However, their net effect is that they tend to boost land prices and rent, so that the subsidies, rather than supporting farming, end up as unearned income for the owners of farmland.

The introduction of LVT would reduce land prices and rents, and, if substituting for income tax, would lower the costs of employing farm workers. This would enable farm subsidies, which tend to distort agricultural production away from the optimal use of land, to be abolished. Lower land prices would also encourage small scale and organic farming as a viable, environmentally friendly way of farming.

LVT as a resource rental

As noted in the introduction, land in its more extensive economic meaning includes also the minerals under the ground, the sea and the atmosphere. In the same way that LVT encourages the efficient use of land in its narrower sense, and at the same time raises revenue for public benefit, taxes – or resource rentals – on the use of land in its wider sense would do the same.

The Labour Land Campaign, therefore, advocates the charging of resource rentals for the use of all natural resources, including those from the sea, as well as such things as landing slots for aircraft, and the use of the electro-magnetic spectrum and airwaves for telephony and broadcasting.