It’s always gratifying to see one’s ideas vindicated in reality – a kind of benign schadenfreude, if you like. This week, Boris mooted that he could switch Stamp Duty from buyers to sellers, something that I have been proposing for a number of years.
It could end a long period of market stagnation, instigated by witless former Chancellor George Osborne’s Stamp Duty escalator ‘reforms’ in that ill-fated Autumn Budget of 2014.
His strategy (probably scribbled on the back of a chewing-gum wrapper) tried to re-model the ‘slab-sided’ previous system by removing buyers at the lower end out of the SDLT net altogether whilst at the same time clobbering potential buyers of over £900,000. If they had the temerity to own more than one property, they were hammered with a surcharge. So much for the property-owning democracy and the party that supports entrepreneurship. Continue reading