Clause 55 - Amount of tax chargeable: general

Part of Finance Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 11:00 am on 5 June 2003.

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Photo of Jonathan Djanogly Jonathan Djanogly Conservative, Huntingdon 11:00, 5 June 2003

I thank the hon. Lady for making that point and will give two responses. First, to say that people might not want to buy property because of stamp duty is simply to ignore human nature. People want to trade up their property, and the fact that they live in the south does not mean that they will not want to do that because of a particular rate of tax. They will want to move up and are being penalised for where they live.

Secondly, the hon. Lady reminds me of a point that I was not going to make. The Government are scrapping stamp duty on property transactions in some areas of the country, the vast majority of which

are in the north, so the impact on people who want to move is doubled.

I want to examine more closely the implication of the tax on the south. Homes in the north are, in general—my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton may disagree—significantly cheaper. Not only are they cheaper, there are tens of thousands of empty homes in the north, and that simply does not happen in the south. There is much greater elasticity of markets in the north, and I believe that we are seeing a crude attempt by the Government to discourage people from moving to the south. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Ms Munn) touched on that in her intervention.