Category Archives: viewpoint

Boris to switch Stamp Duty from Buyers to Sellers

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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 →

Corbyn’s Latest Tax-Grab, Stalin-Style

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Whilst few of the British reside in castles anymore (apart from our cherished Royal family), property owners of the nation regard their home as hallowed ground. In true socialist style though, Neo-Marxist, Dictator-in-Waiting Corbyn has decided that “what’s yours is mine” and is drooling over a Capital Gains Tax on all PPRs (personal private residences).

No former government has ever had the temerity to stamp on this sacred ground, for fear of an electoral backlash, but evidently there is no stopping this complete buffoon and his audacious tax plans. Continue reading →

Ban on Letting Agents’ Fees – boon for the tenant or the clunking fist of needless government interference?

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‘The road to servitude is paved with government intentions’ as economist Friedrich Hayek might have said. His prophetic ideas are pertinent today, where we are on the cusp of a government ‘initiative’ to ban letting fees. As always with bureaucratic interference, a busybody’s desire to help the ‘vulnerable’ ends up as the economic version of playing the piano with boxing gloves, where the cure can often be worse than the ailment.

Any ‘fule kno’ that agents in response will simply raise their fees, which are usually around 10%, to landlords. The inevitable consequence will be higher rent levels for impoverished tenants. Continue reading →