Cut stamp duty to end our housing ‘disgrace’
Boris speaks out on ‘crisis’ for young buyers as he seeks to move on from burka row
BORIS JOHNSON today calls on Theresa May to slash “absurdly high” stamp duty and abandon affordable housing targets to get Britain building, as he brands the issue “the single biggest and most urgent crisis we face”.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the former foreign secretary warns that property developers are operating an “oligopoly” by land-banking, with some accused of building poor quality homes because they know first-time buyers are just grateful to get on the ladder.
In an impassioned plea to the Prime Minister days after she reprimanded him for his comments about burkas, Mr Johnson writes of the “disgrace” of the British housing market as Downing Street announces its own plans to tackle homelessness.
Mr Johnson came under heavy criticism for writing in his newspaper column last week that women who wore the burka looked like “letter boxes”.
It prompted a row within the Conservative Party, with four Cabinet ministers criticising the leadership’s “cack-handed” investigation into Mr Johnson, and has threatened to overshadow Mrs May’s attempts to get Brexit talks on track before final negotiations begin in the autumn.
Yesterday Mr Johnson’s sister, Rachel, and his father, Stanley, supported his remarks, while senior Tories, angry at the way the issue has been handled by Brandon Lewis, the party chairman, and Mrs May herself, said the row could trigger a leadership battle or result in David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, being installed as a temporary leader while Brexit talks continue.
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s con- troversial former aide, also weighed in on the issue over the weekend, stating that Mr Johnson had “nothing to apologise for” and that he had the potential to be “a great prime minister”.
The former foreign secretary makes no mention of the furore in his latest column for The Telegraph, preferring instead to move the debate on to housing, as No10 also sought to shift the focus on to homelessness and what ministers can do to tackle the problem.
Mr Johnson warns of an impending crisis of confidence in capitalism if the Government cannot help young people buy a home and calls for ministers to cut stamp duty, the tax most house buyers have to pay.
It is a cause the former mayor of London has long championed, having called on the Government during his time in City Hall to allow London to keep the housing taxes it raised.
Mr Johnson writes of the housing crisis: “It is not just that things were so much easier 30 years ago, when I left university and went looking for a flat. It was only ten years ago, for heaven’s sake, that the proportion of owneroccupiers among 25 to 34-year-olds was still up at 64 per cent. That figure has now plummeted to 39 per cent – more than half the key generation shut out of the housing market.
“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 cannot expect young people to be automatically sympathetic to capitalism when they find it so tough to acquire capital
‘Older people are staying in houses that are too big for their needs and younger families don’t get a look in’
themselves.” Younger buyers now have to work twice as hard as their parents for a home, the consumer group Which? warned last year, as the gap between first-time buyer earning and the amount they need to borrow has widened significantly.
Although the number of young people buying their first home is creeping up, the average age at which they buy their first home has flatlined.
Referring to government figures, Mr Johnson says that while the UK was building around 300,000 homes a year in 1970, that figure dropped to just 156,000 a year during the Blair government.
Now, he says the Government is “rescuing the position” with 217,000 home added last year.
For the first time since 1995, the proportion of first-time buyers purchasing homes has overtaken the number of existing homeowners moving house, according to a Lloyds study released last month.
Across the UK there were 170,000 home-movers in the first half of 2018, compared with 175,500 first-time buyers, it found.
In his column, Mr Johnson calls on the Prime Minister to “kick-start” the London housing market, which he says drives the rest of the country, by “cutting the absurdly high stamp duty”. He warns that the tax is “freezing whole chains of purchases as people are deterred from trading up, with the result that older people are staying in houses that are too big for their needs and younger families don’t get a look in”.
Mr Johnson also calls on Sadiq Khan, his Labour successor as mayor of London, and others, to drop affordable housing quotas on property developments which he says are preventing new homes from being built.