Stamp Duty Land Tax (Temporary Relief) Bill

Ben Spencer Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 13th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland).

I am delighted that the Government are bringing forward changes to cut stamp duty, to scrap it entirely on homes under £500,000 and to raise the threshold at which it applies. I have spoken to estate agents in Runnymede and Weybridge and they are concerned for the next 12 months. A cut in stamp duty will help people to buy their own home and support the housing sector.

But any intervention in the housing market is difficult. The housing market is already highly distorted and the broader measures we need to fix it are not easy, given the relatively inelastic supply of housing and the fact that the market is in fact several markets, formed of those who buy to live in their own home, those who buy as an investment and those who buy to let or as a business. And of course people often want to buy for several of those reasons and then need to change.

Chewing over how to fix the housing market more broadly is beyond the scope of this debate, but for any market to function effectively it must be free from substantial barriers to transactions. Given the costs involved in buying a house, any stamp duty that is calculated as a percentage of sale price will lead to large duties owed and transactional disincentives. The measures we are debating today will increase the turnover of house sales and improve mobility, supporting people who want to downsize and freeing up houses for young families, enabling more people to own their own home. This will support all the industries linked to housing and create and support jobs. I am perplexed to hear Opposition Members say that they believe that generating economic activity will not support and create jobs. I would love to hear the conversations they have with the lawyers and conveyancers when they say that more houses being bought and sold will not lead to more work and will not lead to more people wanting to refurbish their bathroom or whatever.

This Government have put in place a world-leading package of measures in response to coronavirus and while I welcome these bold changes I ask Ministers whether we can be just a little more bold, and not just cut stamp duty, but scrap it entirely. Stamp duty puts the brakes on the turnover of house ownership. It prevents mobility and, perversely, locks capital into housing as a result, with the arbitrary thresholds for different rates providing further market distortions. How can we aspire to home ownership while at the same time taxing those merely for buying? Taxes are often used to disincentivise behaviour—the tax on tobacco and the introduction of a sugar tax, for example—but the housing market is the only example I can think of where a tax is applied to behaviour, such as buying a house, that the Government want to support people to do. Indeed they have put in other incentives to enable people to buy a house, such as Help to Buy and shared ownership. Across Runnymede and Weybridge people have shown me that, while covid has posed challenges, it has also demonstrated opportunities for change and improvement. So I thank the Chancellor for these changes, but ask him to go even further and stamp out stamp duty entirely for home ownership.