Andy Burnham has spent years talking about serious tax reform. He will very soon be in a position to do it, or at least begin the process.

He doesn't once mention farmers. If there's a certain acreage exemption for farmers (the smallest acreage that would sustain a viable farm in that area, allowing them to make minimum wage income from their land) that is still risky as farmers face many uninsurable risks from year to year & many have bank loans to service as well.
If you exempt farmers all together, would you get enough revenue to replace the other taxes, give a lower tax burden for nearly all of them, & break even? I can't see that.
It seems an incomplete "explaining" when he doesn't adress the elephant in the room.

Good luck to him because he'll need it - and a miracle.

The Tax System - an umbrella term for the multitude of taxes that have been invented over the years - is now such a vast and unwieldy beast that even a whole regiment of government accountants and financial experts wouldn't know where to start.

If any reform is implemented I don't expect to see anything substantial in my remaining years. I imagine such a task will have to be rolled out over a couple of generations.

I guess the fallacy in the argument 'tax land because taxing it won't reduce it' is that taxing land could still reduce the proportion of managed land to wasteland.

I’d never even considered farmers! I was too busy think about elderly people who bought houses with lots of land say 55 years ago and would be unable to pay this tax in many instances.

I think Mr.Burnham will find out PDQ that having an idea is totally different to trying to implement it.

We do know that Burnham has been talking to economist - to what end we don’ t know.

Instead of casting about to put any new taxes in place ( window tax anyone?) he needs to put up income tax, that’s where the most money comes from.Starmer didn’t have the guts to do it, and it does take guts as everyone grumbles, but Burnham needs to.
Then he needs to do a u turn on the policy of putting up NI on employers to get more younger people into work.

Oreo

Instead of casting about to put any new taxes in place ( window tax anyone?) he needs to put up income tax, that’s where the most money comes from.Starmer didn’t have the guts to do it, and it does take guts as everyone grumbles, but Burnham needs to.
Then he needs to do a u turn on the policy of putting up NI on employers to get more younger people into work.

I can see the sense in this!

Cossy

I’d never even considered farmers! I was too busy think about elderly people who bought houses with lots of land say 55 years ago and would be unable to pay this tax in many instances.

I thought the idea was that the tax would be paid on death, but I may have misunderstood.

I really don't think that increasing income tax is the way forward. Workers pay for far too much as it is, and those who don't work pay for far too little. Everyone should pay tax, as everyone benefits from living in the society it pays for.