{"id":5680,"date":"2005-04-21T20:27:12","date_gmt":"2005-04-21T19:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/?p=5680"},"modified":"2005-04-21T20:27:12","modified_gmt":"2005-04-21T19:27:12","slug":"5680","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/2005\/04\/21\/5680\/","title":{"rendered":"Meddling but not changing anything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Howard says that, if the Tories are elected, they will raise the Stamp Duty threshold to £250,000<\/a>. He stated today that, when Labour came to power, the average house purchased produced a Stamp Duty bill of £900. Today, that bill is £1800. His proposal would reduce that bill to nil for all houses below £250,000.
\nI think this policy is flawed.
\nThe principal reason that individuals, couples and "hard working families" struggle to purchase a home is not Stamp Duty, but spiralling house prices. At present, there is a definite pressure on prices of properties around the Stamp Duty threshold that was announced by Gordon Brown in the budget. Properties that might be offered at £160,000, which includes a lot of smaller and first-time buyer properties are actually being sold at or below the "150,000 threshold. Dramatically increasing the threshold might save those families a few hundred pounds in Stamp Duty, but it will take the lid off of prices and ultimately cost them more.
\nThe real problem is with housing policy. The Labour party proposes to offer more low-cost and subsidised housing to this ridiculous group known as "key workers". This does nothing other than add fuel to the market by taking many low-cost homes out of the general market pool, denying them to all the other "hard working families" who work in offices, shops and so on, but are not key workers. As any half-witted economist will tell you, reducing the supply always has the result of increasing prices.
\nIn my opinion, the way to make housing affordable to more people is not to tinker with Stamp Duty. Abolish it, perhaps – that would have a zero effect on the market – but I don’t see HMG abandoning that source of revenue. The way to make housing more affordable is not to subsidise certain groups when they purchase property – that, in fact, has the opposite effect. The only way to improve the position of house buyers is to increase the supply of housing by relaxing or changing planning laws and increasing the number of new homes being built, as well as encouraging older homes to become available in the market again. Increased taxation on second homes that are not rented out (we must encourage a strong rental market) would also discourage second home ownership or alternatively raise revenue from those who are the owners of multiple properties that are denied to the general market.
\nTo me, it seems so obvious, yet neither Labour nor the Conservatives can do more than make policies that generate cheap pulbicity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Howard says that, if the Tories are elected, they will raise the Stamp Duty threshold to £250,000. He stated today that, when Labour came to power, the average house purchased produced a Stamp Duty bill of £900. Today, that bill is £1800. His proposal would reduce that bill to nil for all houses below […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}