Taxing questions for the housing strategy

Posted: June 11, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Stamp duty, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Sooner or later a government will have to grasp the nettle of reforming the way that housing is taxed.

Sooner is the implication of Andy Burnham’s still semi-declared campaign to be Labour leader and prime minister, with the would-be MP for Makerfield keen to reform ‘regressive council tax’ and saying that he believes that land is ‘under-taxed’. 

Soon, says the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG) Committee, in a report this week calling for reform of stamp duty land tax to improve affordability and a review of other property taxes. 

Later has been the answer from all previous governments as they look at the implications of reforming stamp duty, council tax and inheritance tax and see a political minefield ahead of them.

But it’s had to imagine a long-term housing strategy that does not include reform of property taxes, which may be one big reason why the timetable for the one expected from this government has slipped so much.

First promised ‘in the coming months’ in July 2024, the strategy has been scheduled for ‘the new year’, ‘the spring’ and then ‘later this year’ in 2025, then ‘in the spring of 2026’. The current position, almost two years into the Labour government, is that it will be published ‘in due course’.

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What will the Budget do on tax and housing?

Posted: November 5, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Stamp duty, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

With three weeks to go until the Budget, speculation is mounting about potential tax increases on housing. 

Hemmed in by a manifesto that ruled out increases in rates of income tax, national insurance and VAT, the chancellor will have been looking at other options like council tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. 

Rachel Reeves offered few specifics in her speech on Tuesday morning but it seems clear that tax increases are on the way that could have far-reaching effects on housing.

But while it’s easy to think of changes that might raise more money or be electorally popular, or make the tax system fairer or improve the functioning of the housing market, achieving more than two of those aims at the same time is a real stretch. 

Doing all four is near impossible – and that’s before we even get to the welfare side of the Budget and the looming questions about Local Housing Allowance, the benefit cap and the two-child limit.

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An unequal struggle for housing

Posted: May 1, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Inequality, Social housing, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Housing seems such a natural engine of inequality that it’s easy to forget that the opposite was once true.

For most of the 20th century housing was the force that made society more equal. Council housing and rent control improved standards, made homes more affordable and tackled exploitation of tenants by private landlords. 

Owner-occupation expanded -perhaps 10 per cent of the population owned their own home in 1914 but that proportion expanded to a third by 1939, half by the start of the 1970s and two-thirds by the mid-1980s – while the proportion of homes rented from a private landlords fell from almost 90 per cent in 1918 to less than 10 per cent by the early 1990s. 

And then things went into reverse. A fascinating chapter by Susan Smith in this year’s UK Housing Review explores how this happened and what can be done about it. 

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A sheepish Conservative manifesto that misses the target

Posted: June 11, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Fire safety, Help to Buy, Home ownership, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Leasehold, Stamp duty | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing

Wounded by the D Day furore and badly behind in the polls, the Conservatives have retreated to their home ownership comfort zone in their election manifesto. 

Rishi Sunak replayed their greatest hits in a Telegraph op-ed overnight and boasted in his speech at the launch that: ‘From Macmillan to Thatcher to today, it is we Conservatives who are the party of the property-owning democracy in this country.’

But he is well aware that the old tunes will be not be enough to fix the multiple housing crises that have developed over the last 14 years. Especially as his government has fallen badly short of the promises it made at the last election in 2019.

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Budget misses its ‘housing moment’

Posted: March 7, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Home ownership, Social housing, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It was meant to be a ‘housing moment’ that would make a home ownership-based pitch to younger voters.

That was the line briefed repeatedly to the Sunday papers in the run-up to a Budget that will probably be the last before the next election with the Conservatives 20 points behind in the opinion polls.

On new homes, chancellor Jeremy Hunt did have some minor funding announcements for specific schemes that seemed to stretch the definition of ‘levelling up’ to include Cambridge and Canary Wharf. He also boasted that ‘we are on track to deliver over one million homes in this parliament’ without mentioning the more ambitious manifesto target of 300,000 new homes a year.

The ‘moment’ was never going to be about social housing or homelessness. There was a small relaxation of the rules on using capital receipts by local authorities and a six-month extension of the Household Support Fund, but the Budget included none of the measures called for by Matt Downie of Crisis in his piece for Inside Housing last week.

Worse still, the Budget constrains the options for the spending review that will follow the election even further.

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Taxing questions

Posted: November 10, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Land, Stamp duty, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Around £50 billion worth of austerity looks inevitable in next week’s Autumn Statement but it remains to be seen how chancellor Jeremy Hunt will strike the balance between spending cuts and tax rises.

Even if recent reports that suggest he will increase benefits and pensions in line with prices prove to be correct, there are still big questions over local housing allowance (still frozen despite rising rents) and the benefit cap (which will catch thousands more tenants if the thresholds stay frozen) and housing budgets already eroded by inflation look vulnerable to cuts in capital spending.

On tax, the stamp duty cut was one of the few measures proposed in the mini-Budget in September that has survived the demise of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. So far at least.

But there has been very little debate about where the tax burden should really fall, and in particular about the balance between taxes on income and taxes on wealth.

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Austerity all over again

Posted: October 26, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market, Social housing, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

Austerity is back. The mess left by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng will have to be cleaned up, constraining the options for Rishi Sunak and for whoever wins the next general election.

But there is nothing that says Austerity 2.0 has to be a repeat of the 2010s. Treasury orthodoxy is in charge again but there are always political choices.

David Cameron and George Osborne chose to prioritise cuts in public services and benefits over tax rises but that will be more difficult for a prime minister taking office at a time when those services are collapsing and benefits are already close to destitution levels.

And there is one more crucial difference this time around: in the 2010s austerity was accompanied by record low interest rates that slashed mortgage payments for millions of home owners and buy-to-let landlords.

The benefits flowing to anyone with a mortgage – and to existing owners as house prices rose – help to explain why the Conservatives have won four elections in a row. 

But Austerity 2.0 arrives just as mortgage rates are rising and just as the prospects of a housing market downturn are shifting from likely to inevitable.

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Kwarteng’s plan causes growing pains

Posted: September 23, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Budget, Cost of living, Housing market, Stamp duty | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

So, after 10 years of redistribution and socialism under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, now we know what a proper Conservative government looks like.

The biggest package of tax cuts seen in 50 years will cost a cool £45bn and overwhelmingly benefit the highest earners: someone on £1m a year will be around £55,000 better off next year.

The benefits get progressively smaller the less you earn: someone on £20,000 a year will gain just £218 while someone on £200,000 will gain £4,333.

And there is nothing so far for the very poorest: no more help for renters and no boost to Universal Credit.

Instead around 120,000 claimants face having their benefits cut unless they find more part-time hours from January.

There may be some announcements still to come in an actual Budget to follow this Growth Plan, including vital decisions on whether to unfreeze Local Housing Allowance and the benefit cap, but the contrast could hardly be more stark.

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The £3 trillion question

Posted: December 10, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Housing market, Inequality, Tax | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It has so many zeros in it that it’s worth writing it out in full: £3,000,000,000,000.

That’s the increase in the housing wealth of British households since 2000, according to new analysis from the Resolution Foundation. Perhaps even more remarkably, as the graph below shows, around half of that has been (un)earned since 2012, in the wake of a Global Financial Crisis that seemed set to bring the whole market crashing down.

The distribution of all that housing wealth has been startlingly unequal. Londoners gained almost four times as much (£76,000) as those in the North East (£21,000) and the over-65s eight times as much as 30-34 year olds and more than three times as much as 35-39 year olds.

Where the least wealthy third of households gained less than £1,000 per adult, the wealthiest 10 per cent chalked up an average gain of £174,000.

Needless to say, the gains for anyone who has remained a social tenant or a private renter are zero and zero – and less than zero for leaseholders unlucky enough to be stuck in unmortgageable and unsaleable flats.    

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Fixing social care by protecting property wealth

Posted: September 9, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: Inequality, Social care, Tax | Leave a comment

Originally published as a column for Inside Housing.

Boris Johnson has broken all kinds of election promises in his announcement on health and social care levy but for housing purposes there is one pledge remains front and centre.

Amid the wreckage of the triple locks on pensions and tax rates, it’s a survivor of the sunlit days of July 2019 when the new prime minister stood outside Number 10 and said: ‘My job is to protect you or your parents of grandparents from the fear of having to sell your home to pay for the costs of care. And so I am announcing now on the steps of Downing Street that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared to give every older person the dignity and security they deserve.’ Note the order of priorities.

It was there too in the Conservative manifesto in December, even though the ‘clear plan’ had become a somewhat vaguer aspiration for a cross-party consensus.  The significant bit came next (with original emphasis): ‘That consensus will consider a range of options but one condition we do make is that nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it.’

And it’s there front and centre in the plan announced this week for a new £86,000 cap on the amount that anyone in England will have to spend on their personal care costs.

There are still some big caveats to mention – not least that the cap does not include accommodation costs and that social care comes after the NHS in the queue for cash – but the net effect should still be that people get to keep far more of their housing wealth and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.

Yet when we consider the details of the Health and Social Care Levy that will pay for it all, it’s striking that one category of assets and income is left completely untouched.

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