Finance Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-17
Topic: Housing
Stewart Martin Wood (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I want to make a few remarks about the emergency stamp duty provisions announced in the Summer Statement. Cutting stamp duty to stimulate the economy is a classic response to a recession. It stimulates not just the housing market but economic activity around house purchases. At least, that is the theory. The evidence on just how much genuinely new activity it stimulates is patchy, to say the least. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of workers who has lost their job or expects to, this will not make you move house. Most likely, it will bring forward some planned purchases, but I doubt it will stimulate many new ones So, what will it do? First, it will reward people for living in the south-east. The Resolution Foundation has called the measure "a tax cut for Londoners" As my noble friend Lord Livermore reminded us, the average gain if you buy a house in the capital will be £14,200. The average gain in the north-east will be zero Secondly, this is a cash boost for buy-to-let-landlords. Experts suggest that the move will certainly lead to greater transfer of buy-to-let properties into limited company structures to take advantage of mortgage tax relief, so that is one activity that will definitely be stimulated Thirdly, sellers will win, as they will now be able to renegotiate asking prices to take advantage of the extra cash available to buyers. So, another activity this will stimulate is arbitrage between buyers and sellers. Fourthly, sellers may also win when March comes around, as price spikes occur when the cliff edge of the end of this tax break looms. What happens to the property market after that is anyone’s guess Lastly, relatively speaking, first-time buyers will lose, unless they are wealthy ones in London, because the stamp duty proposal spells the end of the period of using the tax to give preferential help to those who have never owned property before. So the stamp duty measures will generate lots of activity and may well pull forward some transactions, but at the price of greater regional inequality, loss of policy focus on promoting home-ownership and first-time buyers through stamp duty tax, and uncertainty and volatility when March of next year comes into view. Is this really where the Government’s fiscal focus should be at a time of unprecedented shocks to jobs, growth and confidence in our economy The unintended consequence of this, of course, arises from a more fundamental problem: the stamp duty itself. It is a bad tax. It applies only when a house is sold, so discouraging mobility and first-time buyers, and its cliff edges mean that there are perverse incentives to distort the price and save on tax. The sensible strategy on stamp duty, in my view, would be to abolish it and tax the huge windfalls that come from owning housing property, particularly for the top quarter of our population, in other ways: a housing services tax, for example, as recommended by the Mirrlees commission many years ago. I also see from the newspapers that the Chancellor is passing an interested eye on revisiting a capital gains tax. But I live in hope that perhaps he and the Treasury will be persuaded to use this moment to think about a more sensible general approach to taxing assets, especially housing, in ways that the curious side-effects of this stamp duty proposal suggest are urgently needed.