Gavin, in answer to your first - it's not so much a drop of a hat" - people actually move about quite a deal nowadays. Whilst 50% of the owner occupancy sector is unmortgaged and therefore you would think pretty stable, the other 50% the average mortgage lasts just eight years - so there is clearly some churn. But business is the key - if there was a 50% saving on your tax bill if you moved from "Silicon" Thames Valley to Silicon Glen you would take a fair amount of economic activity with you.

On your other questions:
- Who would value the land?

Land is already valued - accurately enough for people to judge whether their "single biggest investment" is a good buy or not. We already have vast amounts of data on land and property transactions and the completion of the National Land and Property Gazetteer project will make that easier to apply. I don't see a problem, once people are used to it. It was a problem in Hong Kong - who were able to have a low income tax regime because they have LVT but it often went decades between revaluations so they tended to mess instead with rates.

- If all other taxes are unfair, would it not be sensible, in your opinion, to replace all taxes with a LVT?

Indeed, Henry George called it the "Single Tax". Adam Smith the best species of revenue to tax and so on. However it should be noted that a. it would not preclude taxes - so called sin taxes - that attempt to change habits where those are democratically agreed aims and b. that "land" in this context is a classical understdnaing of land as "all of the material universe not created by application of man and capital" so, for example, could income airport landing slots, definitely includes licenses to lease parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and so on. But yes, I can find few if any redeeming features of income tax, for example. But LVT is definitely intended as a replacement not additional tax.

- Would landlords or tenants be required to pay the tax? If landlords you could instantly destroy the rental market which is necessary to the economy and is fair use of an individual's money.

*Owners* are usually the ones who would pay it. So landlords in the main (especially since it would be driven off the land register). If a tenant was already paying a full market rent it would not be easy to pass it on, since they are effectively already paying (to the landlord) that portion of the rent that is the taxable economic rent. But I don't believe you would destroy the private rented sector, though I do believe it would reduce as the whole thing would encourage ownership over renting. Yields to the owners of all land would fall as a portion of those yields is paid in tax - so it would certainly cause an adjustment in the short term (which might be no bad thing - get rid of the slum landlords mainly who have no interest in looking after their properties properly - such people are living off the unearned economic rent of what they own anyway largely - and incentivise those who do keep their property well and up to date and "worth renting".

There are suggestions - such as a homestead allowance - about ways in which landlords could be given an incentive to do creative things like share ownership. But you are right overall - it is an attack on landlordism - which is presumably why their lordships were so shit scared of it in 1909!"