Rachel Reeves considering charging CGT on sale of main residence?

Even with today’s taxes why would you do that. That’s two sets of stamp duty and what for
If people chose to move because of old age they do so with the expectation of personal future need.

It’s because of new fraud checks
These can’t be done till closer to the time of completion which means all searches are done first then the fraud checks
These were never done before, not to the extent they are these days anyway.
Every penny has to be tracked back to its source

How are the younger generation who have to put most of their income into acquiring property upfront at the cost of pensions, going to be paying a high annual property tax? When most of them won’t even have a pension that is enough to survive on?
Surely if they do CGT it should be allowed to deduct capital expenditure like extension, not the opposite (which mostly also already attracted VAT) and gains from those in their 50s with small pension pots - one should be allowed to pay into a pension pot? (No top up from government) and if you buy another property within 1-2 years you should be able to transfer the gain.

It is only people cashing out for good and not applying to a pension pot or investing in their next property who should be taxed on any gain on main residence.

Short term gain but that’s no way to run a Government
this is a long term loss as we will see a slowing down if the housing market in the future

You wouldnt dodge the stamp duty though
Youd pay a sum every year instead of a lump sum at point of sale and depending on how old you are you’d pay more than the original stamp duty

That’s a tax bill of £120,000 + a yearly extra tax bill for life (assuming you don’t decide to rent instead )

Currently
You would sell your home of 1.6
buy a new home of 800,000 and pay £30k stamp duty ( assuming lower income)
( You could then invest £770,000 to live off all taxed of course which pensioners may well have been relying on )

The difference between the two is
an extra tax bill of £90,000 plus the cost of a yearly extra tax for life.

This won’t cause a market crash. It might serve people with a lot of money to take on a project buying big, expensive, but worn out unmaintained homes; by driving their cost down a little.

But it will inflate the cost of flats and small houses which will affect everyone on a lower income, including young families, separated and divorced people, the downsizing elderly people who have left their big homes, young people who need starter homes and so on. And then presumably this pressure on affordable smaller homes would push rents up correspondingly as people try to save enough to buy stuck in rented accommodation. The only solution is to build more homes, surely.

Maybe it is location-dependent, but our two recent purchases (one fell through the day before exchange as seller pulled out) took 11 and 14 weeks respectively. And the second one only took 14 weeks because the seller hadn’t found an onward purchase.

I didn't say it was paper for goodness sake. Obviously its done electronically

In our case we thoroughly believe it was a power trip and they were trying to be difficult for reasons I won't go into here.

We were unimpressed to say the least.

Otherwise they've been very good and very thorough (which many solicitors aren't) on some complicated and unusual conveyancing stuff which we did need.

I think they try it on to try and make money if I'm honest. If it's all online, then it takes less time and they can't charge as much (and people can conduct searches themselves without the aid of a solicitor).

We knew they were trying it on and they didn't like being told to stop being so bloody ridiculous.

I'm inclined to think some solicitors are beyond help and reason.

I think you’re right. And some of them think their job is to make the entire process as lengthy and stressful as possible.

Given the last time we moved our solicitor argued the toss that we were at risk from ground water flooding and shouldn't buy the property because we were too close to a ground water source, I'm inclined to think some solicitors are beyond help and reason.

We were buying a house at the top of a hill. One of the reasons we wanted to buy a house at the top of a hill was because of flooding issues in the future and had chosen it deliberately because of it's elevated location.

If we flood from ground water, we have bigger problems than worrying about the house as most of the north west will be underwater.

They send off the forms and the councils take weeks and weeks to come back with the answers

Why do they? Who the fuck uses paper any more? All this information should be online and accessible to anyone from a legal firm. You can keep making excuses until the cows come home but you’ll convince nobody who has experienced an infinitely better service in the past.

Of course, the great British public just wants everyone else to pay, the „rich“, the „immigrant“, the old, the disabled, the unemployed etc etc

A fair tax system treats individuals like companies. Takes account of a whole households wealth including pensions, value of real estate, investments, savings and also all of their income minus debt and dependents.
We don’t have a fair system at all. Politicians aren’t revenue raising, they are point scoring and dividing because the system is rotten.
And sadly many in our population don’t have the skills to submit a full tax form including all of the above.

The most important thing in the property market is to stop foreign investors being able to buy in at a cheap pound and benefit. If CGT is going to apply only to U.K. taxpayers it will be another complete farce like stamp duty on U.K. shares but not foreign ones.

Im not making excuses. Im not a property lawyer. It takes time because there are multiple parties involved now and solicitors are dealing with multiple files. Being a solicitor is not a relaxing laid back job I can assure you.

It isn't the solicitors who do the searches its the council. They send off the forms and the councils take weeks and weeks to come back with the answers

Why would you not do that if you want to free up your property? Because it would cost you extra money?

See. It all comes down to people saying "great plan because it won't affect me!". As soon as you could improve some of these apparent societal problems at a financial cost to you it's suddenly not possible.

Why? What sane person would do that? You’re being ridiculous now.

also increased rules around building regs and planning and insurance/indemnity insurance and the fact that you cant even view a house until you can show the estate agent that yours has sold which massively drags out the process and all sorts of other changes

Back in the day as a trainee solicitor I was sent down to the council office to do the searches. I would take a small file from department to department and wait 15 minutes for them to get the information for me and then I'd walk back to the office.

So it should be quicker then. Everything’s online now. You’re just making excuses. The market was red hot in 1999, solicitors must have been rushed off their feet.

But I thought you wanted to free up your big home and not hoard it. You could move into a smaller house with stairs now and then wait for a bungalow.

Its chains and its increased involvement of mortgage lenders and surveyors and its changes in the ways searches etc are done and its the fact that conveyancing now makes hardly any money and so solicitors have to have many more files going on any any one time. Back in the day as a trainee solicitor I was sent down to the council office to do the searches. I would take a small file from department to department and wait 15 minutes for them to get the information for me and then I'd walk back to the office.

Getting rid of stairs would be the sole reason for moving! Just because we can climb them now doesn’t mean we always will.

But this proposal won't change any of that.

And presumably you have stairs at the moment - so if you wanted to you could move into a smaller property with stairs.

It’s absolutely solicitors moving slowly. If not, why is it that a house sale only took about three or four months 20 years ago? We bought this house in 1999, we offered in April and moved in at the end of July - and that was in a red hot market.

It is generally the searches etc that take a long time on a residential property transaction. Even if it was just solicitors going slowly (it isn't) this isn't going to change in the next few months to enable people to push through thousands of new sales.

Those who were thinking of moving anyway might now be given the nudge to do it if they're already in a position to act quickly and if the implementation is delayed. Most won't be.

Anyway this is all hypothetical since it's just an idea being mooted, not something that is actually coming in.

Of course you do. Mumsnet is nothing but altruistic at all times.