What if Stamp Duty was abolished?

Cheap homes and do them up because they need maintenance etc isn’t what I’m saying

Adding extra m2 is

They are not being penalised for increasing their floor plates. They are paying cgtax on making money on developing their property.
Developers pay taxes. Capital gains tax is lower than income tax, seems fair to me

like all cgtax calculations costs are not taxed

No
As I said in my post.

Just the addition of habitable space.

There’s a house down the road that I quite fancy downsizing to. The stamp duty would be £12.5k. Given that we’d release equity of more than ten times that it doesn’t even feature as a deterrent. What does put me off is all the hassle of buying and selling and the actual move.

I don’t agree sorry. Doing up a home is time and money. It’s different to people who buy a home and sit on it for the growth.

You could tax the normal growth. But then people are taxed on uplift and a comparable house for a move will no longer be affordable. So it’s a stamp duty like tax by stealth really.

For those who buy cheap homes and do them up. That’s a lot of time, effort and money. Why should they be penalised even more for actually contributing to developing our tired housing stock.

And if you make gains through the market improving? Many people view their home as an investment and expect it to increase in value - and for many that’s what happens, should they pay CGT on that money too?

Absolutely agree with you. Paying a version of capital gains/sales tax when sell rather than stamp duty when buy makes much more sense. It gets renters into starter homes nore easily, freeing up rentals for others. The housing market starts from bottom up, so if people can't get on the ladder there is less movement further up. DH and I were lucky to get on ladder 20 years ago, we would really struggle to do so now, and I have many hard working friends renting who are saving hard to be able to buy, but the cost of living increases has made this harder to save both deposit and stamp duty.

Band A in my small town in Sussex: a tad under £1200.

We get shit services, public transport is piss poor, the library and leisure centre have their opening hours reduced every sodding year, you have to pay through the nose for a resident's parking permit and the grass verges have been left to grow so bloody long that you take your life in your hands pulling out on to the main road.

And I doubt if you'd find many, if any, band A properties. Even a 1-bed ex-LA flat is band B.

I agree if you increase the size of your habitable space and earn over and above the standard % increase you should pay capital gains tax.

Just upgrading and adding a new kitchen etc would not be cost effective to Hmrc.

Oh for what it’s worth, I agree it’s a terrible tax - just that the reality is that any replacement would likely not be nuanced and would result in a higher tax burden for everyone else.

Why is the cost of childcare affected .
Agree overheads re mortgages on nurseries would be higher but I’m not convinced that’s why some childcare is nearing £1700pcm
That's down to ni increases, staffing ratios, salaries and insurances. Our nursery owners bought the property years ago. Stamp duty and property price had nothing to do with the fees.

Only fairly recently set up nurseries could be marginally affected

This is a far more sensible idea than wealth taxes.

However what about people who buy cheap homes and then massively improve them. Working day in day out toiling away to make gains. That’s not fair on them either really.

Because SDLT suppresses transactions, which reduces labour mobility, slows downsizing, and keeps empty housing off the market. Improving labour mobility, increasing housing supply, and making it easier to move to a property that suits your current (not past) needs is a direct productivity gain.

In economic terms, preventing transactions that both parties would have benefited from is a deadweight loss. Both parties lose out, and no-one has gained. That's the main harm from SDLT.

If SDLT were removed, sellers would put their prices up. But evidence from various countries shows they put their prices up by less than the SDLT cut. In other words, the the saving gets split between the buyer and seller. It doesn't all go to the seller.

But even if it did all go to the seller (which it doesn't), scrapping SDLT would still be beneficial. Why? Imagine the waiter gave everyone at your table the wrong dish. Would you benefit from swapping them round? Yes. Regardless of whether the restaurant knocks something off the bill.

As for consensus. Not everything that makes sense happens in politics. Quickly looked up think-tanks that oppose SDLT: New Economics Foundation (green/progressive), Institute for Fiscal Studies (centre-left), Centre for Policy Studies (liberal), Institute of Economic Affairs (free-market), Taxpayers Alliance (right wing). The OECD judges it to be more harmful to growth than income tax, corporate tax or consumption tax. It's a bad tax.

Mysteriously, the word "fleecehold" never took off. A paranoid person might conclude that's because the media is on the side of the freeholders.

Leasehold isn’t an issue throughout all of the UK, doesn’t exist in Scotland but yes it’s ridiculous.

Yes, fuel duty penalises people who drive, and alcohol duty penalises people who drink. The rationale in both cases is that driving and drinking both create costs that are borne by the rest of society.

Has any government ever actually stated that ?

As far as i know the "rationale" is that if you can afford to drive, or drink, then you have too much money and the government is only too glad to help you solve that problem.

If your assertion was correct we would see (for example) fuel duty being spent on roads ....

I never said I was in Edinburgh. But yes living in Edinburgh is a choice.

Stamp duty? What about this monstrously stupid phenomenon called leasehold? It’s some kind of exploitative practice from the Middle Ages, a feudalistic heritage.
I swear Britain is the only country in the world where you buy a flat and basically you rent it on the long term for 100-900 years! It sounds like a lot but at the end of the day you (your family) are just renting it and it’s never fully yours. Anywhere else in the world you buy a property and it’s yours forever. FFS! This country needs a revolution! 😤

Well there is a society cost associated with the housing market / the inflated values is costing us all dear, it’s raising the costs of necessities like childcare to unaffordable levels so there is a negative side to the housing market

Yes, fuel duty penalises people who drive, and alcohol duty penalises people who drink. The rationale in both cases is that driving and drinking both create costs that are borne by the rest of society. The tax serves a useful purpose of making the person who makes those choices compensate for those costs.

SDLT penalises people who move property. But moving property doesn't impose a cost to society. In fact, it's socially helpful, increasing housing supply, allowing people to move easily for work, to move out of rented property without having to make a big forever bet, etc. So SDLT is has the opposite effect of what we are usually trying to do with transaction-specific taxes. It penalises the socially useful thing.

Having somewhere to live is essential, in the Scottish market spending £500k on somewhere to live is a choice. I’m in a nice area, 4 bed detached house which is valued around £300k, with some exceptions, housing is generally much more affordable north of the border.

It’s shit for people who are forced to move. My husband had an affair and left me, and I can’t afford to buy him out of our house so we have had to sell it. It’s been an unbelievable stress to find somewhere vaguely near their school I can afford on a single income without handing over £27k to the government as well.

Yes, I know I’m lucky to be able to buy a house. I know there are those worse off, but it very much felt like being kicked when I was at my lowest point.

There are some people - admittedly mistaken - who believe that having somewhere to live is not a matter of choice. Still. we'll learn 'em, eh ?

If even this is too frightening for them, what hope do we have of addressing the much bigger thorny issues that the country needs to deal with.

To be fair every move they’ve made to reduce state dependency has been met with howls of rage. Everybody wants something and nobody wants to pay for it. And it was too frightening for the Tory government too, no one has a plan to reduce state dependency, improve public services or pay for the ever increasing public public purse.