A report published this week from the Housing, Communities and Local Government committee, made up of cross-party MPs, has been withering in its assessment of stamp duty – the tax everyone has to pay when they buy a home. The report argues that it stifles aspiration, jams up the housing market and slows down social, generational and geographical mobility. There is no choice but to get rid of it.
Many in Britain will agree with the committee’s assessment. Someone, though, who is guaranteed not to is Rachel Reeves: just last year, the Chancellor lowered the stamp duty thresholds. Now, with even her own MPs turning on her, that tax raid is spectacularly backfiring.
Stamp duty has turned into a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with the British tax system. Rewind 40 years, and it was a relatively minor 1 per cent charge levied on all house sales. It was a rounding error, along with the legal fees and the moving van, and no one thought about it very much. In an attempt to raise more revenue and to social engineer the housing market, successive Chancellors have turned it into a bewildering mess.
Stamp duty is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with the British tax system
