All 63 Liberal Democrat MPs will shortly receive a copy of the pre-Conference issue of ALTER's newsletter Landscape, together with the book Location Matters: Recycling Britain's Wealth

The Party's Conference, its supreme policy making body, meets to debate the Party's latest tax policy reform proposals on Tuesday 17th September. In his covering letter to MPs, ALTER Chair Tony Vickers pleads for them not to oppose a call to drop reference in the Tax Motion to Local Income Tax (LIT) as the fairer alternative to Council Tax.

ALTER claims the Motion implicitly accepts that LIT so waters down the Lib Dems' much vaunted Green Tax Switch (by replacing a local property tax, albeit a very unfair one, with a tax on earnings) that it is almost worthless. Instead the campaign group, which has Environment Spokesman and 2006 Leadership contender Chris Huhne MP as its President, wants the Tax Commission to be re-formed exclusively to urgently tackle the unfinished business of developing new land tax proposals, which last year's Conference asked it to do - but which, ALTER claims, it didn't attempt.

The letter to MPs ends:

What we believe to be utter folly is the scrapping of any domestic property tax without at the same time replacing it with a fairer one. We cannot imagine any of the likely contenders for Lib Dem Chancellor being foolish enough to do it, so why persist in pretending that we would?

ALTER's newsletter includes extracts of correspondence between Vickers and Party Leader Sir Menzies Campbell, in which Vickers claims that LIT is less popular than a 'fairer property tax'. Vickers, who was a member of the Tax Commission and has studied property taxes for ten years, claims the Party is misleading Conference by saying in the Tax Motion that Sir Michael Lyons' recent report on local government favoured LIT as a fairer tax.

Vickers' book sets out what those proposals should be: primarily a national land value tax implemented fully over two Parliaments to replace at least £50bn/yr of taxes on earnings and enterprise.