Stamp Duty Land Tax (Temporary Relief) Bill — House of Commons, 2020-07-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Andrew Griffith (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow not only my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan) but so many of my colleagues who were elected for the first time in December 2019 I warmly welcome the scrapping of stamp duty for purchases of up to £500,000. With average house prices of about £450,000 in Arundel and South Downs, that will help some but not all my constituents directly. However, everyone will benefit from the resulting boost to the economy—the construction industry, painters, decorators, plumbers, electricians, brick makers, timber merchants, furniture and removal companies, and my hard-hit local garden centres, growers and landscape designers—and, because the supply chain stretches across the whole country, the whole Union will benefit The measure is temporary, but after such an excellent debate and such warm words from our colleagues, I wonder whether I can tempt the Minister to settle on this particular piece of fiscal real estate more permanently. In fact, we could make it an early down payment on the vital work to come of simplifying the tax system that he has inherited—a system that, despite the honourable and herculean endeavours of HMRC, is essentially broken According to the World Bank index, the UK is a creditable eighth in the world for the competitiveness of our tax rates, but a rather less competitive 27th for ease of understanding and paying taxes. That is no surprise with a tax code that now runs to more than 10 million words. Along with my Front-Bench colleagues, we have an excellent Chancellor with a sharp intellect and a ferocious work ethic, but it would take him a whole year to read it—by which time it would be Budget time and, like Sisyphus, he would have to start all over again What better time is there to start a crusade for fairer, flatter and simpler taxes, and I note the comments made by my hon. Friends the Members for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) and for Keighley (Robbie Moore)? What better place to start than a tax that does for housing transactions what the window tax did for windows? It is wrong to think of stamp duty as a modest percentage of the price: although the purchase price of a property can be spread over 20 or 25 years, stamp duty has to be paid in a lump sum up front, so it is much more like a deposit, which is the biggest hurdle for generation rent. At a time when interest rates are at all-time lows, it is about not affordability but access to up-front capital. In that sense, we can think of stamp duty as a tax on social mobility. If someone has capital, or their family does, they can quickly pass go, but if their bank of mum and dad—or perhaps just mum or just dad—happens to be empty, getting on or moving up the ladder is much harder It is not as if the housing market was working perfectly, even without the Bill. Prices are out of reach for first-time buyers while empty-nesters are penalised for downsizing. Planning permissions are already in place for more than a million homes—all that the nation will ever need—but those homes are not getting built. Labour tax raids on pension savings destroyed confidence and channelled savings instead into buy-to-let. The planning system incentivised developers to build homes in exactly the wrong places, because that is where the arbitrage is the greatest. Intervention is heaped on intervention, so that, like a teenager’s carpet, we can no longer see the original pattern. I shall return to that subject on behalf of my constituents in West Grinstead, Adversane and Henfield, whose lives are being blighted by the prospect of inappropriate and unsustainable developments Finally, let us remember that the rate of tax is a floor, not a ceiling. If the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), the shadow Chancellor or any of their supporters wish personally to pay more, that is a right that we on the Government Benches would never seek to deny them. I know that the Minister would be happy to let them know the details for where to send the cheque. Now is a time to be bold and decisive and to act fast. The Bill and the measure in it fully meet that objective, and I am proud to support it.