Views on stamp duty

Buyers compete to buy properties based on their budget. Stamp duty holidays free up more free cash. In the short term, it may stimulate activity in the housing market but ultimately it will just drive up prices.

Stamp Duty holidays - Personally we think that Stamp Duty should be something that sellers pay and buyers don't. Doing this would permanently assist the struggling first-time buyers and pass the responsibility up the chain to the people who have benefitted from the lower property prices decades ago and subsequent huge price growth. Seems fair to us.

Stamp Duty holidays have in the past driven up transaction volumes to near unsustainable levels and done little to help people onto the property ladder, as they generally drive-up house prices. There are better ways to help the market if you really feel it needs help.

On the whole Stamp Duty is an outdated and ineffective tax. It would be far fairer to have a tax that is imposed on the sale of the property, and have it based on the growth the property owner has benefited from, such as Capital Gains Tax does, so moving the tax burden to the person who has likely seen the most benefit of rising property prices.

What good would another stamp duty holiday do? All the last one did was increase property prices even higher. A new holiday risks reversing the recent house price falls and pushing values up again. With mortgage rates for many still around 6 percent that would be a disaster.

I wish we could get away from this notion that house price increases are good, and falls are bad.

If the vendor had to pay stamp duty instead of the buyer, that could help stop the rampant house price inflation we've seen over the past two decades, and would stop people seeing their home as a speculative investment.

I still find it hard to appreciate the same bit of land being taxed each time someone buys it. Its theirs, so surely they should get stamp duty from the new buyer? Its very outdated now and should just be scrapped or replaced with something a bit more relevant.

SDLT was originally brought in 1694 as a temporary measure to finance the Nine Years War against France. It proved such a success that it remains in place to this day and in recent years has netted the exchequer £8 billion a year.



Previously ideas such as a Land Value Tax to replace council Tax and SDLT have been floated but rarely get further than the think tank stage. Thoughts that sellers should pay the tax and not the buyers have been muted but in a market that suffers with low stock levels this could cause a log jam in the market.



That said we question whether such high SDLT rates are hampering workplace mobility thereby stifling the economy. There is an argument that lowering rates, especially for the 5% banding, would spark more activity in the market and the economic uplift would offset any reduction in government revenue. Yet by contrast a SDLT holiday would likely only serve to stoke house price inflation making it yet harder for first time buyers to venture onto the

I don’t believe another stamp duty holiday would make much difference in the property market currently. Most people are worrying over their property dropping in value and mortgage interest rates increasing. I haven’t had any conversations with potential clients in the last 6 months that are weighing up if they should buy/sell and stamp duty is holding them back, it’s the current uncertainty in the uk economy and cost of living crisis that are holding people back at present.

Stamp duty is emblematic of the broken UK tax system, a good tax system should broadly be three things, progressive, neutral and effective and the system is none of these things. While Stamp Duty is about the only UK wealth tax that we have its has the unintended consequences of incentivising people to just sit on their property even when its too big for their needs. This is making the housing crisis worse as its removing a large amount of housing stock from the system.
To counteract the loss in revenue if they removed stamp duty for residential properties would be to overhaul the council tax system and make it truly effective and progressive, so a house in Liverpool worth £500K and a house in London worth £30 million they both are on band H council tax and paying the same amount every year, that’s not truly progressive and if anything it puts the tax burden disproportionately on lower and middle-class earners