My full speech on Stamp Duty Land Tax

Описание: Transcript:

I welcome a debate on how we can incentivise home ownership. As a Labour MP, I want more of my constituents in Welwyn and Hatfield to have a secure home of their own, to build their lives within our community, and to have the opportunity to buy a home without relying on the Bank of Mum and Dad. The proposition from the benches opposite is that abolishing stamp duty is the solution. Before assessing that claim, it is important to consider how we arrived here. Under fourteen years of Conservative government, home ownership has gone backwards. There are six hundred thousand fewer homeowners in the United Kingdom today than there would have been if ownership rates had remained at the levels of 2010. That is more than the population of Liverpool twenty years ago. In 2010, around half of people aged twenty-five to thirty-four owned their own home, but by 2022 that figure had fallen to fewer than four in ten.

Members across the House recognise that this is a record of failure. Most would also agree that there is no single solution to increasing home ownership and that it requires a range of coordinated policies. However, there is one simple truth that must be acknowledged: if we do not build more homes, we will not have more homeowners. The last government abandoned mandatory housing targets, and many Conservative MPs repeatedly expressed support for new homes in principle but not in their own constituencies. The Liberal Democrats have been just as guilty of this inconsistency.

Where the Conservatives failed, the Labour government is now acting. We have reinstated housing targets for every local authority, introduced ambitious planning reforms, and committed a record thirty-nine billion pounds to the Affordable Homes Programme. There is still more to do, but progress is clear. Housing starts in the first quarter of 2025 are up by seventeen percent compared to the same period in 2024, when the Conservatives were still in power.

Turning to the proposal to abolish stamp duty, we should ask who benefits most. If your home is worth one and a half million pounds, you would save ninety-three thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds under this proposal. If your home is worth two million pounds, the saving would rise to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, a point that was cheered by members opposite, which I think is revealing. By contrast, if you buy a home worth less than three hundred thousand pounds, this policy would save you nothing at all. That is the current threshold at which stamp duty begins, and forty percent of first-time buyers purchase homes below that value.

The Conservative proposition therefore asks ordinary taxpayers to either accept deep cuts in social security or to pay higher taxes to fund a giveaway for millionaires. That is the choice being presented today. Liz Truss would be proud, and I suspect the Reform Party would be as well, given that their leader once described the mini-budget as the best since 1986.

If we truly want to increase home ownership, the answer lies in building more homes of all types, in offering mortgage guarantees to help those who can afford repayments but cannot raise a deposit, and in supporting low-cost home ownership models such as shared ownership. It also means embracing planning reform and creating a new generation of towns. In just fourteen months, this government has done more to identify potential sites for new towns than the Conservative Party achieved in fourteen years.

If the objective is simply to give millionaires a tax cut, abolishing stamp duty achieves that. But if we are serious about helping people onto the housing ladder, we must reject the Conservative motion, reject their failed approach over the past fourteen years, and support a comprehensive programme of reform that gets Britain building again.

Watch the full debate: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index...

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