Rachel Reeves considering charging CGT on sale of main residence?

How much would you have lost if you’d paid rent over the corresponding period?

It isn't "differing views" its maths..

How do I not pay my fair share? I'm not "the richest and most privileged in society". I pay a significant amount of income tax etc every year.

Again, I think we’ll always have differing views. I think it’s a crying shame the richest and most privileged in society see no need to pay their fair share

No I won't - I would have £500k (less £230k CGT if this came in) so I'd have £270k sitting in the bank. Id have lost money significantly when you factor in inflation.

But you have. If you sell up and leave you’ll have nearly £1m in your bank account.

I think we will always have different views on this.

Did you read what I wrote. I haven't made a gain. It looks like Ive made a gain if you ignore inflation and because I cant produce 15 year old receipts for the building works.

Iv actually lost money in real terms. Ive spent £1.3m I could sell for £1.8m so I would actually have made £500k but actually all of that is eroded by inflation so Ive made a real term loss.

To put it frankly if you have made a gain of nearly £1 million you can afford the tax liability.

The suggestion is to remove stamp duty from everything I have seen.

That simply isn't true.

I purchased my house for £840k in 2009. I have spent about 450k on it. (so a £1,290,000 total spend). Inflation means it has increased by 72% since 2009 (£928,800) but that is just inflation. That puts it at £2.2m (cost plus inflation). It's actually worth about £1.8m in terms of what the market here will pay on a good day (so Ive actually made a loss when inflation is factored in). However on paper I have a £960,000 capital gain since I don't have receipts from the various improvements over the years which would trigger a cgt liability of £230,000.

It simply isn't worth our while downsizing. We would be better off spending all of our cash and re-mortgaging the house to extract more cash and then leaving the remaining equity in the house to be dealt with under IHT rules. Or moving abroad.

That would be slightly fairer.
I'd make it even more fair by taking the original purchase price and increasing it at the rate of inflation / CPI / RPI over the time between original purchase and selling so the figures are more comparable in today's money and then tax is paid on the difference.
So if someone bought a house in 1979 for £30,000 and sold it in 2025 for £600,000
£30,000 in 1979 would be roughly equivalent to about £194,000 in 2025.
So maybe at a small adjustment for improvements at a fixed rate of maybe 10% £194,000
That original amount of money would have been worth about 210,000 pounds so the tax would be on 390,000 pounds which is unearned profit.

And those who bought 20 years ago will have also seen a 95% appreciation in their asset without anything else being done. Regardless of what other improvements they had, just by virtue of owning the house, it has increased.

And I’m sorry you feel that way but can you not see why this is needed?

the country is in dire straights. They can’t raise income tax because it would leave most people unable to survive. They try to raise wealth taxes and everyone kicks off because they say the billionaires will leave Britain. They try to do this and everyone says they’re going to sell up and move abroad. But in reality, this will only be a little more than stamp duty was. It’s just sellers not buyers who pay.

We have an NHS that can’t function, because the population is older and unhealthier than it was was the NHS was introduced. We have a state pension system that is crumbling because of the triple lock, and because people are living so much longer and are on it for 30 years now. We can’t get rid of the NHS because people couldn’t afford to pay for insurance. We can’t get rid of the triple lock because people lose their minds when changes to pensions are mentioned. What is there to do?

Only from the point of the change onwards since before that you wouldn't have known that it was necessary to keep the receipts.

Those who buy a doer upper house next year are fine. Those who did it 20 years ago are not.

I've just gone into DH's study and he is looking at property abroad..

We both work largely from home. He currently goes into the office two days a week but realistically this is just to show his face and it isn't strictly necessary.

Changes to IHT, pensions and property are just too much. There are better options for us personally (mid 50s, kids just finishing uni, all of our money tied up in the house and pensions because we thought we were being very sensible)

And you can deduct any capital improvement costs from the gain so I’m not sure what your point is

Once that door is opened “CGT on primary homes” rest assured the threshold will drop over time until all primary homes are subject to CGT. Next question who will buy a house and renovate it when any gain will be taxed.., Example… house purchased at £800K, renovated and extended over 10 years using earned (and hence already taxed money), new value £2M, and then pay CGT on the gain (note the gain made by using taxed income to renovate). Housing stock will not be invested in or maintained!!

So much of the house price increase has been due to inflation though, We bought in 2009. Since 2009 inflation alone has increased the house price by 72%.

It's just inflation. But its more visible on property

Really? Say your house has grown in value from £1M to £1.6M. And you want to downsize now to an £800,000 property. New CGT would be £120,000 on sale, but you would dodge the Stamp Duty of £80,000. So you would lose £40,000 overall. It’s not nothing, but it could be easily recovered with some good buying negotiation. And you would free up £800,000 in cash.

No, it is not “deluded” at all. And we aren’t “getting away” with anything, we are being massively taxed. And yes, we absolutely can and will leave and yes, you will miss our enormous contributions. And when you complain about that? When the country is in an even bigger pile of shit because there is no one left to pay? There won’t be a violin small enough.

It’s a good idea to make houses places to live and not savings schemes.

i think CGT on primary residences are a good thing too, ideally at the highest marginal tax rate someone pays. But, it needs to be indexed to CPI. No one should be paying tax just because a house has gone up with inflation.

I would be all for a steeply tiered house value tax as well, in return for scrapping stamp duty.

Taxes should both raise revenue and make markets efficient (and thus help economic growth). What we have at the moment is people taking up huge houses that they don’t need or, worse in some cases, leaving properties empty, instead of investing in their pension (see lots of comments above). This makes housing impossibly expensive for the young and keeps investment funds locked in economically useless assets.

There are various ways to increase revenue but this one is madness.

Why not reduce the rate at which traders must charge VAT so that it starts at £0 rather than the £80k (?) that it currently is. You remove the unfair competitive advantage the smaller tradespeople currently have and you reduce their ability to hide their income so you are gaining both vat revenue and income tax and NI revenue in one move.