Stamp Duty Land Tax (Temporary Relief) Bill

Laura Farris Excerpts

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

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith). The Chancellor said last week that Governments rarely get to choose the moments that define them. Apart from making the decision as to whether or not to lead the country into armed conflict, I can think of few more daunting prospects than preparing a country that is on the brink of an economic recession of significant scale and depth right in the middle of a global pandemic.

I will confine my comments to the housing market and the time-limited decision on stamp duty. I hope Members will forgive me if I contextualise this as part of what the Chancellor said about jobs in his statement last week and his attempts to stave off long-term unemployment, which, if we are honest, every Government of every stripe in the post-war period have struggled with when it takes root.

When going through a moment of history, it can be difficult to be clear-eyed about what is happening, but we know that covid-19 discriminates directly on the basis of age. From a health perspective it has the most serious consequences for the old, and from an economic perspective it has the most serious consequences for the young, in terms of both their labour market opportunities and their potentially facing a higher tax burden in the longer term.

One of the reasons I welcome this stamp duty cut is what it says to young people’s hopes of home ownership. It reaches first-time buyers and young buyers. In my constituency, the average house price is £350,000. That is an immediate tax saving of £4,500. I appreciate that a first-time buyer may be buying house worth less than that, but they were very unlikely to fall below the £125,000 previously, so it is a direct saving of several thousand pounds to them.

When I researched what a first-time buyer in my constituency looks like, I got two figures—32 and 33—but it struck me that it does not much matter, because both those ages are positioned squarely in the middle of the millennial demographic: people born between 1981 and 1996 and aged between 24 and 39, so they came of age somewhere between the beginning of the financial crisis and now, over a decade later, during a global health pandemic and, potentially, a deep recession. It is critical that there is a renewed imperative to focus on people in that demographic, who I think have, with some justification, felt a little ignored in the last 15 years, so I welcome a policy that gives them a direct financial boost.

The second consideration, which many Members have raised, is the importance of returning confidence in the housing market to jobs more generally. Construction is a £39 billion-a-year sector. It employs nearly 5% of my constituents, but that figure increases to over 8% if we take into account the secondary industries—the tradesmen we have talked about. In 2019, well over 1,000 new householder developments were approved in west Berkshire. That number has completely fallen off a cliff during the period of stagnation that we have seen in the last three months, yet we face the same pressure on housing supply. The same people want to move up and out—those having babies, settling down or living with their parents. I welcome an initiative that will get those jobs moving.

My final point I hope answers the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) about the excluded—the 3 million. If she will forgive me, I think it is important that we do not just treat them as an amorphous lump of people. When I think about some of the people in my constituency who contacted me, they were small business directors doing things such as garden design; peripatetic workers doing things such as removals, whose income is hard to trace, whose employment status is not completely clear and who have fallen through the cracks; and even, dare I say it, Instagram influencers specialising in renovation and interiors.

It is easy to say, “Well, they’re not very well-known careers” or “They’re not someone we would treat with a lot of respect,” but we should treat those people with respect. They are young, they are dynamic and they are providing a service at every Budget, and they have not always qualified for Government support. You do not need to move house to redo your garden or your interior, but moving is a huge catalyst for that kind of work, and those people directly benefit from this decision on stamp duty.

To conclude, I welcome the time-limited stamp duty break that the Bill offers, and particularly its focus on millennials, on jobs and on freelancers.