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Stamp duty rebate to fund energy efficiency upgrades?

Journalist: Jane Matthews, FTAdviser

ended 11. February 2023

Hi mortgage brokers/advisers,

You may have seen the news recently that Natwest is calling for a stamp duty rebate to allow households to reclaim the cost of their retrofit against their stamp duty in a two year window after the purchase of their property.

FTAdviser is keen to hear the views of the industry on this idea - is it a proposal you support? 

Do you think there is a better way of helping homeowners retrofit their homes? 

What about buy-to-let, would a similar scheme work?

Many thanks, 

Jane

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Riz Malik
Independent Financial Adviser at R3 Wealth
This is an excellent, innovative idea but it will not happen for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Government although trying to visibly promote energy efficiency is not likely to do it at the expense of its tax revenue. Secondly, administering such a scheme would be exceptionally difficult considering we are on our 15th housing minister since 2010. You would end up having a small number of preferred suppliers being approved and the PPE scandal showed us what happens in those circumstances.
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Samuel Mather-Holgate
Independent Financial Adviser at Mather and Murray Financial
Anything the government can do to increase energy efficiency in homes is good, but I fear this could alienate current homeowners. Why should someone who is buying a home get the benefit whilst existing owners don't. I'm all for it, also because stamp duty is too high, but I think it needs to go further including more people and potentially tartgeting those on modest incomes.
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Graham Cox
Director at Bridging Hub
Reclaiming stamp duty to pay the cost of energy efficiency upgrades is an excellent idea. But we also need to address the homeowners who aren't moving or didn't pay stamp in the first place because the transaction size was too small.

It might be better to allow government-backed interest free loans or grants over say, 10 or 15 years with any repayments taken from pre-tax income.
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Amit Patel
Adviser at Trinity Finance
A great idea in principle but we all know how poorly the track record of this Government is. The cost to set up the scheme will take years considering we have a change of ministers regularly. If the Government were to offer rebates then they will recoup the lost tax revenue by raising taxes elsewhere.
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Scott Taylor-Barr
Principal Adviser at Barnsdale Financial Management
I quite like this idea; it obviously has its issues (don't all schemes?); what if you don't have the upfront cash to do the work? Is the cost of checking rebate applications greater than the rebates being dished out? But, as the spark of an idea it's a good one - everybody likes the idea of getting tax rebates, if we can tie that into helping towards net zero, then even better.