The chancellor Rishi Sunak is coming under growing pressure to scrap stamp duty altogether, along with council tax, and replace both charges with a national property tax instead.
Momentum is growing among some politicians and campaigners for a more radical and “fairer” approach to property taxes, according to The Guardian.
A petition organised by the Fairer Share campaign that calls on the government to abolish stamp duty, along with council tax and the bedroom tax, and replace them with a flat-rate payment based on the existing value of a property, has already been signed by more than 100,000 people.
Those supporting Fairer Share include the campaign group Generation Rent, which represents private renters, including many hoping to buy a property at some point.
Dan Wilson Craw, deputy director of Generation Rent, said: “Stamp duty should be rolled into council tax, to make an annual payment that is proportionate to the value of what people own. That would mean removing a major barrier to people moving home, while making sure wealthy property owners pay a fair share.”
Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake, also chairman of Hunters, is among those that believes that council tax and stamp duty should be replaced with ‘a proportional property tax (PPT) which would tax all homes at exactly the same rate based on up-to-date property values’.
He commented: “These taxes are unfair, complicated and block aspiration. Unfair because the poorest find themselves hit hardest. ‘Complicated because they are difficult to understand and command an intricate web of bureaucracy to administer.
“And they hinder aspiration by taxing property transactions and discouraging people from moving home.”
Meanwhile, in a new policy paper or the centre-right thinktank Policy Exchange that was published last week, economist Gerard Lyons, a former economic adviser to Boris Johnson during his second term as mayor of London, argued that stamp duty on housing transactions “is a bad tax” and should be scrapped.
He said: “Ideally stamp duty should be abolished, but as a first step it should [be] cut to zero permanently on lower-valued properties and reduced on higher-valued properties.”
Comments (3)
Or rather than Council tax there could be a local income tax for anyone over 18.
Of course students and those in receipt of UC would pay only a small proportion based on ability to pay
We could call this local income tax the
Community Charge
It would be collected by HMRC and distributed to councils.
Seems fair to me!
Its only 0.46% for someone who owns their own home, its 0.96% annual charge for anyone who owns a second home or rental property. There are no growing calls for this immoral tax to be introduced other than from the obvious lefties.
This is the featured snippet of a Google Search. Our solution is the Proportional Property Tax. A simple flat rate of 0.48% on the current value of your property. … The tax is only paid by property owners, not tenants. Payment of the tax can be deferred for those owners unable to pay.
Still trying to understand how an ongoing tax based upon rising house prices only paid by 65% of the adult population is in any way aspirational and fairer.
Far simpler way to redistribute the tax burden is to re-evaluate and widen the bands. Currently. Band H represents property below the average house price in the UK
Same with the SDLT, just increase the threshold.
Simple and uncomplicated