Personal Account

I’ve just endured a tortuous property purchase, but I’m one of the lucky ones – ministers must see sense and extend the stamp duty holiday

Many of us have taken up hobbies to pass the time in lockdown. My mum does art classes and virtual book club; Dad obsessively reorganises the loft. My chosen hobby, perhaps better described as self-flagellation, was attempting to sell a flat and buy a house.

Thank god that the tortuous process is nearly at an end – we have exchanged contracts and will move into our Victorian terrace on the south coast next month. This is the third property purchase I’ve been involved in and once again I’m left utterly amazed that anyone manages to get one over the line.

Friends who live in eastern Europe tell me that most of the wrangling between buyers, sellers and their conveyancers is done in a single day, at a physical meeting ( in normal times, of course) where all disagreements are thrashed out.

I’m sure in time my brain will eventually find a way to block out the horrible memories of emails written in legalese accompanied by 4,000 attachments. The point is that, although it took more than five months from the offer being accepted to completing, I am one of the lucky ones. We will save £15,000 because the deal will be done before March 31, when the stamp duty holiday is due to end. That is, unless the Government sees sense and agrees with The Telegraph that the deadline should be extended – ideally indefinitely.

This week, Zoopla, the property listing website, reckoned that 70,000 deals agreed in 2020 would miss the deadline, potentially causing sales to collapse entirely or leading to panicked last-minute price cuts.

Sales agreed this year will be completed before April only with an ambitiously fair wind. You’ll need an efficient council, ideally enough money not to need a mortgage, and to be chain-free. Anyone else should start negotiating a lower price. Most frustrating is that the agonisingly slow pace of transactions is neither the buyer’s nor the seller’s fault.

The house buying infrastructure is simply overloaded. Local authorities, bank staff and solicitors are working from their bedrooms, extending the usual times for property searches and mortgage approvals (our lender insisted on using a fax machine, which can’t have helped things).

So what are the chances of the deadline being extended? An online petition backing this newspaper’s campaign quickly secured more than the 100,000 signatures required to spark a Commons debate, due to take place on Monday.

Perhaps Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is worried that cutting taxes for home movers while millions of workers languish on state-sponsored furlough is not a good look. What would be worse is cutting out the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people stuck in supposedly unsafe flats from the tax break.

Through no fault of their own, these homeowners are unable to move because of post- Grenfell rules around cladding even, bizarrely, when it is nonexistent. Labour has tabled an amendment to the Government’s Fire Safety Bill that would give leaseholders extra protection from ruinous bills.

The Government should back those measures and move its arbitrary stamp duty deadline so that cladding victims don’t miss out yet again.

Sales agreed this year will be completed before April only with an ambitiously fair wind