Image: Chart from OBR Economic & Fiscal Outlook December 2014. Click for larger image.

Following the changes to stamp duty announced by George Osborne in the Autumn Statement, the Scottish Conservative Party has published proposals to change the proposed Scottish replacement – Land and Buildings Transaction Tax – due to be introduced in April 2015. The topic was raised at First Ministers Questions today (col. 14)

The Tory proposals include halving the rate between purchases of between £250,000 and £500,000 from 10% to 5%. The party claims that its proposals “would mean 97 per cent of transactions, including all those below £500,000, will leave house-buyers better off.”

This claim (and similar claims by the Scottish Government) that cuts in stamp duty rates represent a saving to housebuyers is misleading and wrong. It is a symptom of widespread illiteracy around the fiscal dimensions of land and property.

In broad terms, people have a fixed budget when they buy a house. They can, perhaps afford £150,000 made up of a loan and capital of their own. This sum has to cover the costs of acquisition (fees and stamp duty) and the sum paid to the seller for the house. If stamp duty rates are reduced it follows that more money is available for the other costs (fees and the price paid). Assuming that fees remain fixed (such as land registration fees) and others (survey fees and conveyancing costs) remain unchanged (either as a fixed sum or as a percentage of purchase price), the money saved in stamp duty will be available to bid up prices.(1)

This is a straightforward economic principle that was the subject of this useful analysis by Shelter and is noted by the Office of Budget responsibility in its Economic and Fiscal Outlook December 2014 on page 126 as follows.

The OBR analysis makes clear that the cuts proposed by George Osborne and the Scottish Conservatives will be more than offset by higher house prices. Those higher prices will, in many cases be financed by loans, the interest on which will be higher over many decades. A small saving in a one-off transaction tax will not simply be more than offset by higher house prices but by ongoing, compounded and volatile interest payments to financial corporations.

The best solution (and the one I advocated two years ago and is recommended by one of the Scottish Government’s own economic advisers – Sir James Mirrlees) is to abolish this transaction tax in its entirety and replace the volatile yield with a better-designed system of recurrent taxation of land and property. The Mirrlees Review (Chapter 16 pg 404) noted that,

If the Scottish Conservative (and indeed other parties) want to be truly radical, they would be well-advised to stop tinkering with rates (that will not have the claimed effects), abolish stamp duty and its associated bureaucracy, and agree to far more fundamental reform in fiscal policy relating to land and property.

(1) Of course, buyers are often sellers and will receive higher bids for the property that they are selling. But given that most buyers who are sellers are trading up, this merely exacerbates the inflation in prices.