Yahoo Finance Record year for stamp duty as taxman nets £1bn a month in 2017
Stamp duty – the tax on property purchases – netted the taxman a record £13bn in 2017, by far the largest take for any calendar year.
The total represents a 13pc increase on the £11.4bn collected by HM Revenue & Customs in 2016 and a 95pc rise on five years ago. Successive increases have been driven by a succession of rate rises and a surcharge on second homes.
The exemption for first-time buyers announced in November’s Budget appears to have had little immediate impact on the overall take, with the more tax collected in December than October.
High overall levels of stamp duty are blamed for a continuing stagnation in housing transactions.
Jeremy Leaf, a former chairman of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, said the record take would make the Government hesitant to fix the problem.
“If you want to boost transactions and improve social mobility one way of doing that could be to remove stamp duty,” he said. “But that seems unlikely when the revenue is taking in so much money from it.
“The Government will be unlikely to change something if they don’t feel it’s broken.”
Lucy Brennan, of Saffery Champness, the accountants, said a combination of the 3 percentage point surcharge levied on many buyers and a combination of other changes to the system.
“Stamp duty is turning into a very good earner for HMRC,” she added.
The Telegraph has campaigned for the abolition of stamp duty in a bid to boost the housing market and help first-time buyers.
Conservative MP John Stevenson has also called a Westminster Hall debate on making it a “sellers’ tax” to help first-time buyers, many of whom, particularly in London where values are highest, have not been helped by Philip Hammond’s exemption.
The average first-time buyer pays £3,500 in stamp duty, or £10,000 in London, while Yorkshire Building Society estimates that 60pc of renters would be helped onto the ladder if the tax was reformed.
