Contribution
That’s how you do it! That is how you actually have a position—it is the wrong position, but at least it is a position. The hon. Lady keeps talking about unfunded tax cuts, but she is getting her language back to front. We do not fund a tax cut, because it is the British people who fund Government spending, so when Government spending is eased, it eases the burden on the British taxpayer. It is spending that needs to be funded, not a reduction in spending.
I will reinforce what I thought were a number of strong interventions in support of the motion. I was struck by my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin) speaking about his own experience trying to get on the housing ladder and how his enthusiasm was diminished by the realisation that stamp duty was going to make it even more difficult. The hon. Member for Pendle and Clitheroe (Jonathan Hinder) made a legitimate point that this tax affects different parts of the country very differently. He made the fair point that there will be many parts of the country where it is not typical that people pay stamp duty land tax, or a significant quantum or scale of it, but that is not a good reason to deny this reduction in cost to those people in the country who do. Although there might not be many in his constituency, I guarantee that he would not have to travel far before he starts to meet people who are being dissuaded from purchasing properties because of stamp duty land tax. Certainly for Members representing constituencies near big cities, wherever they are across the country, or constituencies in the south, significant numbers of people pay this tax.
It has been mentioned by many Conservative Members—too many to single out—that this proposal would positively impact not just the people who pay, or may pay, stamp duty land tax. I guarantee that almost all of us can imagine the streetscape that I am about to describe from our constituencies. There are perhaps Victorian or Edwardian semi-detached or detached houses on what used to be the periphery of the town or city before it expanded beyond that. It will typically be a band of properties populated disproportionately by older couples or older people, who have often been in the constituency for many decades. Their children have moved out and they are now under-occupying those properties with two, three or perhaps even four bedrooms spare, but they are deterred from downsizing because they fear the stamp duty that they will have to pay. Estimates show that 2.8 million people would consider downsizing—or rightsizing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor said—if stamp duty were removed. We would then have a ripple effect throughout the housing market, freeing up family homes for people who are currently in overcrowded accommodation.
Not only that, but the London School of Economics estimates that for every housing transaction, an estimated £6,000 of economic activity is pumped into the local market, with local builders doing refurbishments, perhaps doing extensions and fitting new bathrooms and kitchens, and people buying soft furnishings and white goods—the sorts of things that people buy when they move. What type of business typically provides those goods and services? It is local businesses—small and medium-sized enterprises embedded in their communities. These are the people who are being denied economic activity because this tax is stifling the property market.
We need liquidity in the property market. We need people buying and selling. We need people spending money with local businesses in local shops across the whole of the country. That is what reducing the tax burden on people does; it is what removing the stamp duty land tax will achieve.
Yet on the Government and Liberal Democrat Benches, Members are contorting themselves to find excuses not to reduce this burdensome tax, and I genuinely do not understand why. Some 2.8 million people could release their homes on to the market; if each of those homes had two or three spare bedrooms, that would immediately eclipse the 1.5 million homes that Labour is desperately trying to convince the country will be built under its tenure. It could be done almost immediately, without a brick being laid, and—more importantly—without the need for any Government subsidy.
That is what the House is saying no to, but not those on the Conservative Benches. We on these Benches understand aspiration. The Conservative party has always been the party of aspiration. We have always been the party that helped people to get on and up the housing ladder—a noble and normal aspiration, and one that we support, even if other hon. Members do not support it.