Gideon Amos

Access to home ownership has never been harder. Fewer and fewer people can afford to buy a home of their own, and 12,000 households in my county of Somerset are languishing on the waiting list unable to get a home at a decent rent. We have heard a lot about Mrs Thatcher, but since the sell-off of council houses began, 2.3 million were never replaced. The Conservatives broke that promise over and over again, so although our population has increased by five times that amount, we have had a massive loss of homes for social and council rent; several Conservative Governments never replaced them. By taxing transactions, stamp duty land tax is unfair on buyers. It needs to be reformed, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) has said, as part of a full review of property taxes. The vast majority of first-time buyers would be completely unaffected by the Opposition’s proposals, because they already pay no stamp duty land tax. It seems clear that, by triggering a big increase in house prices, the policy would mostly benefit those who are selling homes at high prices, and probably only those right at the beginning of the chain. More importantly, wiping out tax revenue without wider tax reform or any serious proposals for the resulting massive hole in public finances would be another Liz Truss Budget in the making. Perhaps she planted the magic money tree, but this autumn we are seeing the fruits of it in more mad Conservative tax proposals. It seems clear that the Conservatives have learned nothing from the Truss Budget’s rocketing of inflation and increasing of mortgage rates, which affected everyone in my constituency.