Mayor for London Ken Livingstone has given his strongest backing yet to a tax on property owners to pay for Crossrail.
Speaking at a meeting of the GLA’s planning & spatial development committee yesterday, Livingstone said that a land tax would make it “easy” to build Crossrail.
He said: “If we get, as I would like, a Treasury agreement for some sort of planning gain tax based on the value of land as it increases when you build a new Underground line& then building Crossrail becomes easy.”
Livingstone also referred to the 400% rise in land value around the stations on the Jubilee Line extension, and said that the rise in value should have been taxed to pay for the project.
It is thought that the gain would be treated as a windfall, and taxed using planning tariffs.
Livingstone hopes that the money could then be redistributed across London to pay for the infrastructure projects.
Crossrail, which will extend across London from Heathrow and Reading to Canary Wharf and the Thames Gateway, has been dubbed by deputy mayor Nicky Gavron as “the spine of the London Plan”.
Both the mayor and critics of the mayor’s vision for the future of the capital have said that if the line is not built by 2011 Livingstone’s ambitious agenda to build “a new city” in East London will be impossible to achieve.
EGi News 19/09/02
