Labour government would force landlords to offer indefinite tenancies

Same as shares then.

Free money for everyone!

Fancy comparing these healthy processes with the enrichment which comes to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts of a great city, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing.

Ahem. As he is a landlord he is, by definition, making his property available to others in return for a rent. He is not, therefore, sitting back and doing nothing.

He is fulfilling his purpose and providing a service to people in need of homes. These people either do not wish to own his property, or do not wish to live in it for long, or cannot afford to buy that property, yet can afford the rent it. In all these cases he is providing a useful and valuable service.

Indeed, he himself would not receive an income if he simply sat back and did nothing, as he could, preferring instead to awat the rise in value of his idle land, benefitting nobody else in the meanwhile.

Economically speaking he or she is providing nothing.

TWhat we experienced was a fleeting 'golden age' of property ownership that many have been able to take advantage of simply by being born at the right time. Now they have seen an enormous windfall increment to their wealth, and have leveraged this privileged position to impose grievous exactions on the young and worse off.

Well the taxman is a fraud, then, deducting tax from nothing, as he must. Perhaps there is a magic money tree after all, if the property owner can prove nothing valuable and yet pay tax on that nothing. We should encourage everyone to become a landlord, do nothing, and create further wealth that the taxman can benefit from.

We have experienced a fleeting golden age of mortgage rates at 15% and two year queues to qualify for that mortgage. We are now experiencing a golden age of the people who agitate fror free movement of people complaining of the effects when that movement causes a shortage of property to be available and to rise in price to the extent that native young cannot afford it while immigrant not-so-young can afford it.

What part of the concept of 'unearned income' is so difficult for you to digest? They are not deducting tax from nothing. They are deducting tax from rent. The rent is real. That doesn't mean it isn't unearned.

Unearned simply means that it didn't come from normal employment in a job and that is is a receipt from an asset, in this case property. In the less narrow, non-tax-related meaning of 'earned' the rent is earned by the provision of a service or benefit - housing.

If the landlord has received a rent then the tenant benefitted by living in the house. You may claim that no net economic benefit resulted but the fact remains that the tenant has a home that he found worthwhile to pay for, the landlord has an income he would not otherwise have had, and the taxman has some tax. That sounds like a net economic benefit for everyone to me.

You use the money from tenants to pay for services they would be able to find (or do) themselves. As a 'big' landlord, you can perhaps claim your service is getting lower prices and more reliable repairs as you can build relationships with the contractors. Then again, you might just outsource that to a property management company as many do.

But the main point is, do you think any of your tenants want to own their own home? And do you see that your (and other landlords') actions of buying properties make it more difficult for tenants in a way that is profoundly unequal (details earlier)?

The right to buy is fine as long as there's a requirement on the property that it be lived in by the owner, a requirement that continues no matter who it's sold to (obviously make them aware of this). The problem came more specifically from landlords buying the right to buy homes to let them.

Landlords do not provide housing. House builders do. The landlord would still, strictly speaking, have that income if he/she chose to live in the house instead. That's imputed rent. They used to tax that as well, just like any other rental income. Now try getting your head around that!

No you can only make tangible money from the property market if you have more than one property, you cannot possibly make money on the house you live in regardless of market values.

Economics was removed from the NC and desperately needs to be reintroduced

Landlords do not provide housing. House builders do.

If you are an owner-occupier you are effectively paying rent to yourself, in lieu of renting somebody else's property. It's a weird concept but economically it's an important one when considering things like national income and, until relatively recently, taxable income. From Wikipedia:

"More formally, in owner-occupancy, the landlord–tenant relationship is short-circuited. Consider a model: two people, A and B, each of whom owns property. If A lives in B's property, and B lives in A's, two financial transactions take place: each pays rent to the other. But if A and B are both owner-occupiers, no money changes hands even though the same economic relationships exists; there are still two owners and two occupiers, but the transactions between them no longer go through the market. The amount that would have changed hands had the owner and occupier been different persons is the imputed rent. Imputed rents can alternatively be understood as returns to investments in assets. On these grounds, imputed rents might be included in disposable income, e.g. when calculating indices of income distribution."

But not to people who cannot afford to buy, and to the disadvantage of people who want something for a short period. Landlords step in to fill the gap. Perhaps you would prefer the gap to gape.

Recently? Unless you want to count rates as an imputed rent tax, Britain abandoned this even before it stopped charging an upper rate of income tax of 99%.

Wasn't it abolished in the 60s? Maybe it's the Medievalist in me but I'd call that relatively recent.

It is a bit tricky to class the 1960s as recent, especially in the field of income tax that changes literally every year, when it is well outside the living memory of all but a handful of your audience.

Who cares?

Yes they do but they cannot afford it, how it that my fault? I'm buying property at market value in not getting a discount, the market is desided by supply and demand and political happenings. How am I stopping anyone ow img their own home, i/we don't control the market, the government we electe does! We just have to live in the world the majority vote for.

Which brings me to TRTB and you are Wrong, absolutely totally wrong the right to buy is exactly what has caused the private renting boom that people like myself have capitalised on. You either belive in the free market or you believe in state housing you can't have you cake and eat it, if you buy the house off the council you live in it, when it is passed on to your children as inheritance you are going to dictate how people spend that money?

The right to buy us a disaster of a political policy, it's cost the taxpayer and chocked affordable housing for million of people.

they take money in rent that would go towards a tenant's deposit,

Those being tricked?