Stamp Duty Land Tax

Antonia Bance Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Antonia Bance (Tipton and Wednesbury) (Lab)]

Here we go again, Madam Deputy Speaker—always the promise of tax cuts to come, never the proper plans to ensure it is affordable. This motion tells us everything we need to know about the modern Conservative party; once again, its first recourse is to reach for the austerity button instead of making a serious plan to invest, grow the economy and strengthen our public services. Reckless with the public finances and reckless with our public services, the Conservatives are not a serious party.

I was going to make this point specifically for the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), but I see that he is not in his place, so everyone else can enjoy it instead. Yes, it is time for the greatest hits of austerity—the 14 years in which the Conservatives talked and did this country down, when day-to-day spending on public services fell by nearly 17%, stripping away nearly £46 billion every year from the services our residents rely on. Members should remember that figure as I talk about austerity, because the Conservatives would fund the tax cut we are talking about today with £47 billion—a larger number than that figure from the austerity years. Look at the back-of-a-fag-packet plans that they have to make it add up.

Let us remember what austerity did to our country. It left our NHS with a £10 billion repairs backlog. It left nine in 10 of our schools in urgent need of repair, with more than 230 schools with Swiss cheese for roofs, including reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in the roof of Wood Green school in my constituency. Those pupils deserve so much better; they deserve a decent place to learn. We will make that happen—the Conservatives did not.

When the pandemic struck, our public services were critically understaffed and had received critical under-investment. The result, thanks to the Conservatives’ austerity and cuts, was more than 170,000 excess deaths, putting the UK among the worst in the developed world.

In that period, our precious public sector workers who give their all—nurses, teachers, carers—had their pay frozen or capped for years, leaving the average nurse more than £4,000 worse off than in 2010. The Conservatives left one in 10 workers in insecure employment, including the better part of a million on zero-hours contracts.

The Conservatives’ cuts to social security pushed more families into poverty, which has resulted in 50% of children in my constituency living below the poverty line. That is every second kid—every second door when I walk around the estates that I have the honour to represent. Some 117,000 people are now living in temporary accommodation because of the money the Conservatives took out of the affordable housing building fund that today they seem so very pleased to speak in favour of.

[Gregory Stafford]

I just wondered if the hon. Lady had any views on stamp duty land tax.

[Antonia Bance]

I am speaking today about the other part of the motion before us—the part about the unspecified cuts that would pay for the tax cut—and the implications of that. As the hon. Gentleman would expect of a responsible member of my party, I am not going to speculate with plans about how we fund things for which there is no plan.

Going back to the record of austerity—remembering that austerity cost and took out of our economy less than the Conservatives propose taking out in their motion today—it left the bottom fifth of households £517 poorer, while the top fifth gained £174. Austerity did not just deepen inequality; it entrenched it. It led to the longest pay squeeze in 200 years, with growth anaemic, productivity absolutely flatlined and public investment slashed.

My friends at the TUC have worked out—[Interruption.] Yes, they are my friends. I was proud to represent millions of working people. Conservative Members speak about those working people with disdain, but it was an honour to represent them in their workplace and negotiate for better wages on their behalf. Good Conservatives in the past used to understand social partnership and the importance of responsibility and working with workers and bosses to get the best outcome; it is a shame those lessons have been forgotten, with the baying calls of the mob at the mention of trade unions. My friends at the TUC have worked out that if wages had risen in the past decade by the amount by which they rose between 1997 and 2010, the average worker in my constituency would be £93 a week better off—that is nearly five grand a year more in people’s pockets. Instead, we got the longest pay squeeze in 200 years.

[Rebecca Smith]

I am just perplexed as to where the hon. Lady is going with this. Ultimately, the statistics that she has just quoted would have saved her constituents £5,000, but if the Government do not scrap stamp duty, anybody who aspired to buy a slightly bigger house with that increased income would not be able to afford to do so.

[Antonia Bance]

To be clear, the point that I am making is about the unspecified cuts referenced in the motion. I am talking about the implications from the last time the Conservatives made cuts of that magnitude. While it may be the case that getting rid of stamp duty would save some money for people in my constituency, where there is an average house price of £190,000, it would by no means have the impact that it would for people in richer constituencies in other parts of the country. The cuts that the Conservatives intend to make to pay for it would, however, hit people in my ends.

Despite all the pain of those years of austerity, it failed to reduce public debt in any meaningful way. That is why our public services were on their knees and we face a mountain of debt that has built up over 14 long years.

Now compare that to our Labour Government, who are steadily and slowly delivering the change that this country needs. We are creating 5 million extra NHS appointments, and the number of people in my area waiting more than a year for the operation that they need is down 45%. Thanks to the investment from our Heath Secretary, crack teams are going into Dudley, Wolverhampton and Sandwell NHS trusts.

We secured three major trade deals in the first 10 months of our Government, and wages went up by more than they did in the first 10 years of the Conservative Government. We are putting in pride in place funding for communities that are hit the hardest, such as Friar Park in my constituency, and £39 billion of affordable housing funding is going to fund new social and affordable homes—the largest amount in a generation. I hope that 600 of those will be in my constituency.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

The hon. Lady referred to the trade deals—so many more than were achieved under the Conservative Government, she says—but the reality is that those trade deals could not have been made had we not had the Brexit deal that we achieved when in government. What is more, the Labour party opposed that deal. We could not do those trade deals before 2016.

[Antonia Bance]

One of the key achievements in the first 15 months of this Labour Government has been that we are starting to fix some of the mess from the dreadful agreement that the Conservatives made with the European Union, which undermined this country. We are filling some of the holes, and making it easier to do trade with the European Union and sell brilliant British products abroad. I would have thought that would be something that the Conservatives would welcome.

In summation, we choose national renewal—a Britain built for everyone. We choose a fair economy that rewards working people, invests in our public services, restores dignity to work and rebuilds this brilliant country for every single one of our kids.