Stamp Duty Net Widens

Eight out of every ten home buyers in England and Wales now has to pay stamp duty, according to figures from the Land Registry. The number of people paying the tax has more doubled to nearly a million under the Labour government.

In 1996, a year before Labour came to power, the number paying stamp duty was 424,000 – around 43% of property purchases. Just over ten years on, and the figures has reached 989,000 which is 78% of buyers, and the amount the Treasury receives from each transaction is £6,515 on average.

In five years the Halifax says that the total amount paid by home buyers in the whole of the UK has gone up from £2.7bn to £6.4bn – a rise of 140%. With price rises being what they have been those in London and the South East have been the worst hit, and Halifax estimated that they paid 73% of all stamp duty in 2006.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says that the average first-time buyer purchase is now £162,000 – in the 1% stamp duty band, meaning that first-time buyers also have to find over £1,600 to hand over to the Treasury.

Meanwhile as people struggle financially to buy their next home, complaints about estate agents have risen by 23% this year. This increase comes after a 54% rise in the number of estate agents joining the Ombudsman for Estate Agents scheme, who said that membership is rising faster than the number of complaints.

The previous year saw an increase of 18% in complaints, but this year the number has gone up to 8,269 for all properties. Ombudsman Christopher Hamer said: “While membership is rising, sadly so are complaints against members, although at not such an incredibly fast rate.”

There are now around 11,800 estate agencies that are members of the scheme, which gives consumers more rights for redress when things go wrong