So, the Conservatives have decided to abolish stamp duty on primary residences. A bold, crowd-pleasing stroke, you might think – except it’s one of those policies that looks generous only until you do the maths.
For a buyer in London picking up a £1.5 million house, the saving is around £90,000. For someone scraping together a deposit on a £250,000 terrace in Swindon, it’s about £2,500. For renters or those priced out of the market entirely, it’s nothing at all. In other words, it’s not a tax cut for homeowners – it’s a subsidy for the wealthy.
The Treasury will lose about £9 billion a year, apparently to be “offset” by spending cuts elsewhere. Cuts to what, exactly? Hospitals? Schools? Welfare? It’s a familiar trick – bribe the asset-rich and send the bill to everyone else. This is not an economic plan; it’s electoral theatre.
Stamp duty has many faults. It’s clumsy, distortive, and discourages people from moving. But if you’re going to scrap it, you need to replace it with something fairer – a land value tax, for example, which targets the wealth locked up in property rather than punishing movement. What you don’t do is rip out a £9 billion revenue stream just to buy a few headlines and some votes in the Home Counties.
Let’s be honest. This isn’t about “helping homeowners”. It’s about helping donors. The people with multiple houses, investment portfolios, and second homes in Cornwall. The ones who think “ordinary homeowners” means anyone with a private drive and a Range Rover on tick.
And here’s the irony – if you make houses easier to buy, without building more of them, prices simply rise. The supposed benefit evaporates, leaving first-time buyers exactly where they were before, only further behind.
It’s economic snake oil, bottled in a blue label.
If the Conservatives really wanted to make housing fair, they’d tackle speculation, stop foreign capital inflating prices, and build affordable homes. But that would upset their friends. So instead, they’ll torch billions in tax revenue and call it freedom.
In truth, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s just another transfer of wealth – from those who work for a living to those who live off what they already own.
2 comments:
If any politician of any party wanted to fix the housing market they would first, get rid of Right-to Buy so that councils could build homes that won't immediately get bought by the tenant in five years time, and second, introduce Capital Gains Tax on house sales to slow the inexorable increase in house prices. Oh, look! A flying pig.
The truth is, every major party tiptoes around housing like it’s a live minefield. They’ll tweak planning laws, fiddle with Help to Buy schemes, or wave through another tax holiday for the well-heeled – but they won’t touch the fundamentals. Because to do so would mean admitting that our entire economic model is built on ever-rising property values – and that most voters, knowingly or not, have been made complicit in the bubble.
So instead we get the usual pantomime: Tories promising tax cuts for million-pound homes, Labour mumbling about “affordability targets”, and the Lib Dems producing yet another glossy policy paper that no one reads. Meanwhile, the average renter watches 40% of their income vanish into someone else’s mortgage, and first-time buyers compete with buy-to-let speculators for the same two-bed flat.
It’s not a housing market any more – it’s a national Ponzi scheme propped up by tax breaks and wishful thinking. And the only thing that’s flying is your pig, silhouetted against the setting sun, soaring high above the rubble of Britain’s political cowardice.
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