BURDEN OF TAXES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18063, 13 April 1933, Page 9

BURDEN OF TAXES

LANDOWNERS’ DILEMMA INTERESTING OFFER LONDON, Fob. 28. Somerset House has recently been made an interesting offer by one of the great landowners who is staggering under the burden of succession duties imposed on huge but unremunerative estates. This landowner, whose properties extend to nearly 300,000 acre®, during the past few years has paid up many hundreds of thousands of pounds towards the great total of the tax. To do so he lias been obliged to sell heirlooms, property, and other realisable possessions. This process having been exploited well-night to the limit, ho has offered Somerset Houso a large slice of his land, including many farms and at least one village, in lieu of cash payments. The taxation authorities' awn valuation of these properties is nearly three times the total of the duty they are claiming. Yet Somerset House has declined the offer. . DUKE OF MONTROSE'S PRO- . POSAL

Only last week the Duke of Montrose, who has had to break up and sell 89 per cent, of the agricultural ostato to which he succeeded on the death of his father, made a suggestion on which this offer blight bo said to bo based.

His proposal was that the Ministry of Agriculture should be empowered by the Treasury to accept land in settlement of death duties, to he taken over at the value assessed for tax. The Duke added that such a concession would be useful in the case of Scottish farms and small-holdings, which are unsaleable because they arc held on terms of fixity of tenure, thus preventing the giving of entry to a purchaser. “A landowner of such property, saddled with death duties, finds himself absolutely cornered,” he wrote. ‘* Ho cannot sell his property and he cannot pay his death duties.” Under his suggestion the small-holders would become tenants of a public authority instead of an individual.