There were few Tax changes in today’s Budget, in respect of SDLT, for the Residential Property Market.
Of the few measures put forward, was the £500million for the Housing Infrastructure Fund, which according to Mr. Hammond will allow another 650,000 homes to be built. Although this sounds dramatic, if it is spread across many fiscal years, it won’t make much of a difference in order to help fix the ‘broken housing market’. Continue reading
Dear Chancellor,
I know you have some competing issues to consider at the moment, not least of which is finding the resources to meet ‘Maybots’ NHS largesse of £20billion. Nevertheless, for pity’s sake, you must do something about the distorting effect of the existing Stamp Duty regime on the UK Residential Property Market.
Whilst the SDLT changes may have been a laudable aim of the former Chancellor Osborne, to slow the property market down, thereby protecting the housing stock, the measures he used were closer to ‘stingers’ than they were to ‘sleeping policeman’.
Even intelligent observers of the Residential Property Market, particularly in London, are being fooled into believing that Brexit and its uncertainty, is responsible for the slump in activity to date, when the cognoscenti know full well, that it is all down to the ‘fall out’ from Stamp Duty.
When Mr. ‘cack-handed’ Osborne imposed these draconian hikes in this tax in 2014, he thought, somewhat stupidly, that it was the Tory’s version of a Mansion Tax. Like all myopic politicians, he had no idea of the devastating effect it would have on other parts of the economy, such as retail spending and the UK growth rate. Continue reading