Stamp Duty Land Tax

Debate between Andrew Murrison and Daisy Cooper

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Daisy Cooper]

No—for all the reasons that I will come to. The hon. Gentleman was a fraction too early. Here’s the rub: stamp duty raises a lot of money, and that is presumably why the Conservatives did not seek to scrap it at any point during all their years in power.

Stamp duty for primary residences in England and Northern Ireland raised around £4 billion in 2023-24, and it is suggested that it will raise £9 billion in 2029-30. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the cost in 2029-30 will be around £11 billion, with the additional costs in Scotland and Wales taken into account. That means that abolishing stamp duty on primary residences would cost in the region of £36 billion to £44 billion in total over the next five years. For anybody who is not keeping up, that is almost the cost of the mini-Budget, just in slow motion.

The Conservatives say that they want all those cuts to come from public expenditure, but in this motion they do not say where those savings would come from. By my calculations, they could choose to scrap nearly the whole of the Ministry of Justice—given revelations in recent days about prisoners being let out wrongly, it feels like that may already have happened.

The Conservatives could instead decide to end all support for farmers by scrapping the entirety of the budget for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which reached £7.4 billion in 2028-29, including capital—[Interruption.] Well, it does not say that in the motion. Maybe they would want to do away with the cost of clearing the vast majority of the NHS maintenance backlog—a cost they would reach in a single year—or maybe they would want to scrap the £12 billion a year budget for special educational needs and disabilities. It is not clear in the official Opposition motion where the cuts would come from.

There is a strong case for looking at reforming or scrapping stamp duty all together, alongside other property tax reforms and moving to a land value tax. Indeed, some commentators suggest that scrapping stamp duty and council tax together and phasing in a land value tax over time could be one way to move ahead.

[Dr Murrison]

The average price of a property in St Albans is £642,000 a year. Under the proposals of the hon. Lady’s party, how does she think her constituents would face paying ever more taxes, either through stamp duty land tax or the council tax reforms that she and her colleagues propose?

[Daisy Cooper]

As the right hon. Gentleman will understand, I am not setting out proposals; I am commenting on the proposals from his party. For the record, I was not setting out Liberal Democrat policy; I was discussing what some commentators have pointed towards. I am sure that in the next two or three years, as we get closer to the general election, the Conservatives will be very interested to read our tax plans, which are under active consideration.

Even if people cannot agree on what should replace stamp duty, they can agree on this: if we change one tax in isolation, there are knock-on negative effects. Far from giving more people the security of home ownership, this measure in isolation would put it further out of reach. How do we know that? We know it because there was a big surge in house prices during the temporary stamp duty holiday in 2020-21; it had a negative impact on house buyers.

If the Conservatives—and, indeed, the Government—are truly interested in growing the economy, surely they will agree that the best and most immediate way to do so is to reverse the damage of their terrible Brexit deal with Europe. Analysis shows that if the Government did a better deal with the EU, within their own red lines, they would raise an additional £25 billion per year by unleashing the growth potential of our exporting British businesses.