Squatting is to become a criminal offence: do you think it should? POLL

There is no council tax on unoccupied homes in most areas. People are keeping these homes for financial gain, i dont know about anyone else but im not likely to porfit on my unused possesions such as pens and pencils.

Companies have to pay tax on the value of its stock at the end of the year because its being used to make money, why should an individual be any different?

Normally I would advocate prison, but there's no point. Our prisons are too overcrowded and most of the squatters are illegal immigrants anyway. A deportation order, or a heavy fine in compensation, should be enough.

if the house has an owner then yeh they still pay council tax, my parents rent out houses and dealt with this when they first started.
and theres nothing wrong with keeping a bit of land or house for financial gain, its their property, their choice! Stock is different because it does not belong to one private individual, but to a corperate business
a lot of people keep stamps/coins/jewlery etc to make money, wanna tax them too?

They are taxed upon sale anyway... The government doesn't miss a trick.

not really what we're talking about, the other guy wants to tax people on unoccupied houses in order to try and make them rent them out/sell them
the stamp duty is a one off fee that everyone pays and is based on the houses value not status of occupancy

Lol dumbest suggestion yet?

No one knows where the illegals are from - where are you going to send them with your 'deportation order'?

And a fine - do you think squatters have money they declare to the Inland Revenue?

Thats quite a naive way of thinking about this. The fact that those people don't own the house and for most cases they will not be have to face any consequences from how they treat the property, means that they aren't likely to take as much care to the house as if it was their own.

The same way Customs deport any illegals that are found in the back of vans at Dover or in some warehouse in the country.

As for the fine, even squatters have some tangible assets that can be recliamed by the state. If not, community service would help benefit the community, whilst keeping prison spaces for violent offenders.

I know it is, and I think it is wrong. This is my original point. A society shouldn't allow some people to be homeless and others to own more than one property. It doesn't seem right. Sometimes it's not about choosing to follow the rules or not; it is impossible for some people to follow society's norms once in a certain position. I understand that most squatters aren't doing it out of desperation, but I advocate squatting for political purposes too. Anything that draws attention to the huge inequalities in society is good.



Actually, they're not living there illegally. It's not currently a criminal offence, but there is talk of making it one, which is what this thread is about. It's not so easy for people to just 'get a job'. If they have no qualifications, no experience, have been in prison etc. they're going to find it very difficult. A lot of people with more than one property have inherited it. Why is one person more deserving than another?

if the house has an owner then yeh they still pay council tax, my parents rent out houses and dealt with this when they first started.
and theres nothing wrong with keeping a bit of land or house for financial gain, its their property, their choice! Stock is different because it does not belong to one private individual, but to a corperate business
a lot of people keep stamps/coins/jewlery etc to make money, wanna tax them too?

So your argument is one of necessity, that surplus or 'unused' resource should be utilised even if this is at the expense of an individual's right to their own property. With that logic, you could similarly say that people should have their savings taken away and given to the poorest of the population who can't afford basic essentials, because many people have savings that are untouched well over 10 years

Under Labour we saw huge huge increases in the amounts being spent on the poor in an attempt at equality... and what do we have? Even more inequality. I am as susceptible to anyone of the 'won't somebody please think of the children argument', but I am also susceptible to the argument that having these people as parents is just as damaging if not more damaging as being poor. Even if you had 1 social worker to 3 poor children on council estates, and made every school into a Jamie Oliver style dream school (which would cost nigh on 1000% of our economy), there would still be the same persistent social problems that we face. The only option, then, is to reduce the burden that these people pose on the working, because taking money out of their pocket to subsidise the feckless is clearly resulting in swelling numbers of the feckless and dwindling numbers of the hard working.

I know these people who only have access to the 'bad' jobs. They sat next to me in class. They were told thousands of times that if they continued down the route they were taking they would end up in this position. They didn't just get out of bed one morning and find themselves in this situation. They were also taught by everyone around them to use contraception properly, but still over 1/5 of all girls in my year got pregnant and dropped out of school. They couldn't have been given more opportunities. Furthermore you also seem to forget that we need these people in our economy. Presumably you don't take your own rubbish to the dump? Or scan your own items in when you go to the cornershop? Or pour your own drinks when you go out at night? Or sew your own clothes? The travesty is that people like yourself repeatedly tell those on the lowest rungs (who are there through mostly their own fault) deserve more for less. These jobs need doing.

There's a potentially infinite amount of stamps, coins, jewellery et al to go around, and more is being created all the time which will eventually accrue in value.

But land is finite, particularly in the UK. It is not a commodity that should be cheaply bought and sold for a profit, but a valuable resource that we must make the best of. Allowing private individuals to own huge swathes of land simply to turn a profit seems ludicrous to me - we have better uses for it.

I know. My point was just that people are already taxed enough on that property. Why they don't want to rent it is beyond me, especially in the nicest parts of London. Rental yields are like 5%+ p/a.