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The Oxford Mail today reports on a particularly nasty little problem of flooding we have in central Oxfordshire, and for a city built around the confluence of two rivers it's one that needs to be addressed:

Flood relief scheme 'years away':

VICTIMS of flooding in Oxfordshire will have to stick with the sandbags for a few more years - as a proposed £100m flood relief channel is still at least a decade away.

How, I hear you ask, would LVT help. Well, for a start this debate has been going on for, as the article says, ten years and more already. Thus far, and no doubt until the Environment Agency gets government approval which it says it hopes to do next year, none of the solutions, let alone the £100m "gold plated" scheme mentioned, have any funding. And that's leaving aside the fact that DEFRA in its current state seems unable to stick to its budgets for things like flood relief, robbing them to pay farm subsidies and other things that it should be funding as well. Should - of course - in the sense of under current regulations, not in my opinion!

In the meantime all the properties affected by flooding have their values depressed. Not because they aren't nice houses, but because of their location in a now reasonably regularly flooding area. It's the land value that's being affected. In addition, insurance companies are wise to this and are now charging much higher premiums for insuring homes in flood risk areas.

But with the investment in flood relief measures, these values, and the ability to insure these properties would bounce back.

If we had LVT, first of all, the tax authorities (at whatever level of government) would be getting much less out of such locations. How could they lift the tax take from these areas? That's right, spend on the anti-flooding infrastructure and see the land values and therefore tax takes rise again. At the very least of course, the property owners there would have some small comfort that until that infrastructure was in place, the inconvenience of the flooding and higher costs of insurance would at least be offset somewhat by a lower tax bill.

It won't relieve the misery of coming downstairs to find your Axeminster in soggy ruins but at least it offers a way of financing and an incentive for government to get on with such infrastructure projects.

Technorati Tags: climate change, land value tax, london, oxford, property tax