Miliband to tackle housing crisis
MILIBAND SAYS HIS PARTY WILL ABOLISH STAMP DUTY AND GET MORE ON TO PROPERTY LADDER
Labour to help first-time buyers and favour local ownership by scrapping the levy on some purchases and raising taxes for foreign property investors
Ed Miliband will pledge to help first-time buyers and favour local ownership by scrapping the levy on some home purchases and raising taxes for foreign property investors if his Labour Party is elected on May 7.
In a bid to tackle Britain’s “modern housing crisis,” Miliband will say first-time buyers won’t have to pay stamp duty on homes valued at less than £300,000 (Dh1.6 million) for the first three years of a Labour government. In a speech in Stockton-on-Tees, northeast England, he also promised that if they’ve lived in an area for more than three years, British buyers will have the first opportunity to buy half of the new homes built there.
That stamp-duty exemption would be partly funded by raising taxes paid by companies that buy UK property for foreign investors and by increasing stamp duty for homebuyers from outside the European Union. Local councils will also be allowed to as much as double the tax they charge on homes that have been left empty for one year, Miliband said.
“There’s nothing more British than the dream of home ownership, starting out in a place of your own,” he says.
Fading dream
“But for so many young people today that dream is fading with more people than ever renting when they want to buy, new properties being snapped up before local people get a look-in, young families wondering if this country will ever work for them.”
Miliband’s announcement challenges Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to position his Conservative party as the champion of home ownership. With lack of supply, and demand from foreign buyers stoking UK property prices, the housing market has become an election battleground for both parties, as Britons increasingly struggle to afford a home. Miliband’s promise to focus on first-time buyers follows a pledge by Cameron earlier this month to extend right-to-buy to housing association tenants, a move that could benefit 1.3 million people.
Miliband’s proposal to abolish the stamp duty could save firsttime buyers as much as £5,000. Tackling tax avoidance by landlords would also help fund the measure — expected to cost £225 million a year. Homebuyers start paying the levy over £125,000 of a property’s value.
Local ownership will be encouraged by making it illegal to advertise homes for sale abroad first,.
More than a third of properties in London have been bought by overseas buyers, Labour says, while average house prices have risen to eight times the average wage and twice as many properties are bought by buy-to-let landlords or cash buyers than first-time buyers.
We have the character of an island nation: independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.”
David Cameron
UK Prime Minister