With news from the British Bankers\u2019 Association (BBA) today (February 25) that property sales are likely to continue rising, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) is calling stamp duty \u201can unfair tax that distorts the property market\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to the BBA, mortgage lending figures suggest that house sales will continue to soar, with the number of mortgages for home buyers that have been approved but not yet lent, up 57 per cent on this time last year.<\/p>\n
The BBA said that the revival in activity had been helped particularly by the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, leading to approvals for new purchases reaching their highest point since September 2007.<\/p>\n
However, according to Rics and other property experts, scrapping stamp duty would be much more of a \u2018help to buy\u2019 than any scheme, as the higher prices for property now are leading to buyers paying up to three times as much in stamp duty than they would have done years ago.<\/p>\n
The Institute of Fiscal Studies has just undertaken a five-year study of the UK tax system and agrees that stamp duty is \u201chighly inefficient\u201d, discourages mobility and means that properties are not held by the people who value them the most.<\/p>\n
The Institute\u2019s report was particularly scathing of the tax bands, which were set years ago and have taken no account of inflation, meaning that if someone bought a home at the average UK price of \u00a3250,000, they would pay stamp duty at 1 per cent. However, if the property cost just \u00a31 more, they would be charged 3 per cent.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, however, as house prices rise, the Government is less keen to reform the tax and particularly the tax bands, as the Treasury is set to take \u00a39bn in stamp duty by 2017, three times more than it did before the financial crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With news from the British Bankers\u2019 Association (BBA) today (February 25) that property sales are likely to continue rising, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) is calling stamp duty \u201can unfair tax that distorts the property market\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}