Stamp Duty Land Tax

Debate between Kit Malthouse and Rachel Blake

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kit Malthouse]

I will in a minute. The third point I want to make, which I guess is the one that might appeal most to Government Members, is that this tax is generationally unfair. Younger people move house more often, so they are more exposed to this tax. The younger someone is, the more likely they are to be building a family, to require more space, and to be moving up the ladder. Older people tend to sit still. They sit pretty on their capital, which is often in unmortgaged houses. Because of the lack of a market, they generally under-occupy the houses they own. When looking at stamp duty, we have to look at generational fairness, too.

In my constituency, hundreds and hundreds of aspirational families need more space. They would like to move up the ladder. They have worked hard and accumulated a deposit and the money that would allow them to move, but they want to spend that money on curtains, carpets, decoration and all the rest of it. They are deterred from moving by this tax. If we are to be fair to the next generation, we have to not only build the houses that they want to buy, but make it cheap for them to buy them, and that means cancelling stamp duty.

For all those reasons—to ensure fluidity and liquidity in a market that is skewed to produce artificially high prices; to ensure a market in which developers take a risk and build more houses, and landowners put land forward; but fundamentally for a generation who are being denied access to housing—we need to take seriously the idea that stamp duty is at the heart of the problem, and we need to abolish it entirely. The Liberal Democrats say that abolishing it will raise prices. It of course raises prices if we tell people that there is a window. That would result in frantic activity from those who are desperate to buy. If the abolition becomes permanent, we get a liquid market that achieves a real price, notwithstanding the initial bump.

As for those who say that the savings cannot be found, we should be able to find this amount of money, given the size of the Government’s budget, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) said. I had a look this morning, and I could find 50% of the amount in the Department for Transport’s budget, no problem. The other half could come from the welfare reforms on which the Labour party bottled it. We could easily find the money and do the whole country and the economy an enormous favour.