Veteran Cannell Benmore has spent 60 years at his home in Richmond, London. He and his wife live off their retirement savings, but nevertheless face an annual bill of £2,500 thanks to Labour’s new “mansion tax”. Here, he details his worries about the incoming levy and how unfair it feels to hard-working homeowners.
When my daughter celebrated her wedding in the back garden of our Richmond house, the apple tree in its centre was small enough to fit inside the marquee.
The ladies all put their hats on the branches. They couldn’t possibly do that now.
The tree has grown much too big to fit in a tent. I have watched it grow over the decades since my wife and I bought the house as newly-weds for £15,000 in 1968.
She had a little bit of money, I had a bit of money, and we used all of it to buy this house, which is just down the road from where I grew up in Kew. We’ve been married for nearly 60 years and we still live here, in the same house.
But now, having cleared a 30-year mortgage through hard work and sacrifice, and retired on our savings, we face a sudden additional tax bill of at least £2,500 a year. Our house is now worth around £2m – it could be a little more, or a little less – so we will be caught in the net.
This is because of the imposition of the so-called “mansion tax” from April 2028.
Introduced at last year’s Budget by Rachel Reeves, the former chancellor, it disproportionately affects homeowners like us in London and the South East, where property prices are higher.
About 165,000 homes will pay it. But the “mansion tax” has come with many technical questions. How can a house that hasn’t been sold for nearly 60 years be valued properly? How will valuations be done, and how can that many homes be accurately valued? How can homeowners appeal and how many will?
