Boris demands a stamp duty cut to ease the housing crisis

As Rees-Mogg backs building on green belt...

STAMP duty should be cut to prevent property developers forming an ‘oligopoly’ over the housing market, Boris Johnson has demanded.

The former foreign secretary said young people are being prevented from getting on the housing ladder because of the ‘absurdly high’ levy.

Mr Johnson accused large property companies of ‘ landbanking’ to keep house prices high, and said they treated their buyers like ‘serfs’.

His call came as fellow Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg warned the party needed to accept more building on the green belt as not all of it is in areas of outstanding natural beauty.

He described the housing shortage as the biggest challenge facing Britain.

And Mr Johnson, writing in his Daily Telegraph column, urged Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan to abandon quotas on affordable housing to fix Britain’s ‘ housing disgrace’. The article made no mention of the burka row that was ignited by last week’s column in which Mr Johnson compared veiled Muslim women to letterboxes and bank robbers.

Mr Johnson wrote: ‘ This is meant to be Britain, the great homeowning democracy, but we now have lower rates of owner- occupation, for the under-40s, than France and Germany. That is a disgrace; and you can’t expect young people to be automatically sympathetic to capitalism when they find it so tough to acquire capital themselves.

‘We need to tell Lefties like Sadiq Khan to stop their ideological obsession with quotas for affordable housing on each development.’ Mr Johnson described how almost twothirds of house-hunters ten years ago were aged between 25 and 34. But now the percentage of young buyers has dropped to 39 per cent.

He blamed the 2008 financial crash for decimating the property industry, leaving only a handful of large companies that dominate the market. Mr Johnson accused the giant firms of not making use of around 500,000 permissions to build and said more needed to be done to build new homes.

His intervention was echoed by North East Somerset MP Mr Rees-Mogg who claimed villages across the country could each take up to 50 new houses without changing

top tory: build on our green fields or get corbyn The Mail, August 7 ‘This is a disgrace’

their character. His remarks come a week after Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss warned the Tories must build homes in the countryside – or they will hand power to Jeremy Corbyn.

Mr Rees- Mogg told the Financial Times political podcast: ‘I think the biggest chal- lenge facing us at the moment is housing. The housing market has problems – it is very expensive, mobility has declined, we need to build more houses. We need to build houses that people want, rather than what architects think are good for them.

‘That means a difficult conversation with our own supporters about where we build on green fields. It is going to be primarily on green fields ... but there is going to be some element of green belt as well because not all green belt land is in areas of outstanding natural beauty.’

However, campaigners have warned the green belt is already being ‘gobbled up at an alarming rate’ to build thousands of homes.

Around 460,000 properties in green belt land have been planned since 2013.