Daisy Cooper

I begin by adding my voice and that of my party to the others who have welcomed the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Dan Tomlinson) to the Front Bench. Like so many other things, property taxes in this country are broken and hopelessly out of date. Council tax is regressive; stamp duty is a transaction tax that slows growth; and business rates are a tax on bricks and mortar that bear no relationship whatever to the amount of money a business might make. It is quite extraordinary that the official Opposition have chosen to debate property taxes, given that I can barely remember any discussion at all in the last Parliament about things that they wanted to tackle in that area. In particular, they did not tackle any of the three things I have mentioned. If it is true that the Labour Government are now thinking about biting the bullet and bringing forward fairer alternatives to those things, I commend them for looking at the issue. However, I caution the Government not to repeat the jobs tax fiasco. Going after property simply as a Treasury tax grab will be a disaster if the Government do not set out a broader vision for property taxation and for housing as a whole. We agree with parts of the Conservatives’ motion today. We agree with their call to rule out capital gains tax on primary residences. In the general election, we Liberal Democrats set out a way of reforming capital gains tax to make it fairer, one that would reduce that tax for two thirds of people already paying it and increase it for the super-wealthy. That would have raised more revenue than the carte blanche measures that the Labour Government have pursued, so we agree with that part of the motion. We also agree with the Conservatives that the property levy that has been described in newspapers would be a disaster. It would choke up the housing market, stop people from downsizing and slow economic growth, so I hope that if Ministers are considering any of these things, they look at the reaction there has been.