Stamp Duty Land Tax

Debate between Lucy Rigby and Luke Evans

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Rigby]

It is a tax, so obviously I do not love it, but what I find extraordinary is the Conservative party’s new-found hatred of taxation when they increased taxes 25 times in the last Parliament.

As I said, we heard from various hon. Members about their objections to this tax. I will not engage on the points made about the Budget, for obvious reasons, except to repeat that we are committed to a single major fiscal event per year where the Chancellor will set out any tax decisions in the usual way alongside the OBR’s forecast. That fiscal event will take place, as everyone knows, on 26 November, at which point there will be plenty of time to discuss and debate the decisions that the Chancellor takes in the Budget.

I want to speak to some of the points raised during the debate. We heard plenty from Conservative Members about why they want to abolish stamp duty. I think some points were made thoughtfully; I say that in a well-meant way. I am sorry to say, however, that we heard absolutely nothing from Conservative Members on their appalling economic record. We heard nothing from them on their appalling record on house building—save for the acknowledgment of the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse)—nothing on the waste of public money from the fraud on their watch, and nothing whatsoever that could be described as fiscal responsibility.

We heard from some of my hon. Friends on the Labour Benches about the urgent need to build more houses in this country, given our appalling inheritance. That is the key way that we solve the housing crisis. I pay tribute to the thoughtful speeches of my hon. Friends the Members for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin), for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis), for Crewe and Nantwich (Connor Naismith) and for North Warwickshire and Bedworth (Rachel Taylor), and to my hon. Friends the Members for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) and for Tipton and Wednesbury (Antonia Bance), who spoke powerfully of the consequences of the Conservative party’s mismanagement of the economy, which include food banks, poverty and, of course, the housing crisis.

I welcome the commitment of the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire. He talked about the need to build more housing and, indeed, about beautiful housing. I assure him that that is exactly the type of housing that this Government will facilitate being built—although I note that his colleagues took him straight back to opposing development no sooner had he made that point. I also welcome his mini-insight into the infighting of the last Government.

[Dr Luke Evans]

The hon. Lady may recall that it was a Labour Secretary of State who removed the word “beautiful” from the national planning policy framework. How does she expect to have those beautiful designs if that has been taken away as a standard within the guidance that her Government provided?

[Lucy Rigby]

I assure him that the houses will be beautiful and that we will build 1.5 million of them over the course of this Parliament. There was a brief reference to Nirvana from the Conservative Benches before a descent back into half-baked and unfunded plans, to which we on the Government Benches thought, “Well, Nevermind.”