Huddersfield Property Market What is going to happen to Stamp Duty on 11th March?

If you are buying a home in England costing more than £125,000, you will have to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax on the purchase of your new home. In the provinces, it’s called something slightly different, so if you are buying a property in Scotland over £145,000 you will pay Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) and for any property over £180,000 in Wales you will pay Land Transaction Tax (LTT). Whatever the tax is called, it is an important factor when moving, when you consider that

Last year the average UK house buyer paid

£10,150 in Stamp Duty Tax alone

Now as soon as the date for Rishi Sunak’s budget was set for 11th March 2020, conjecture in the Press began about what stamp duty changes he may disclose on budget day. The Chancellor only sets the budget for England and Northern Ireland, yet this is just as relevant for Wales and Scotland. Even though Derek Mackay, the Scottish Finance Secretary said on 6th February he has no plans to change Scotland’s version of Stamp Duty (LBTT), more often than not, Stamp Duty rule changes in England are often adopted in Wales and Scotland at a future date.

Some are asking if Sunak will impose what was promised in the Conservative manifesto with the 3% additional Stamp Duty surcharge on non-UK resident buyers? I have certainly heard in the Estate Agent community that foreign buyers are trying to rush through their sales in central prime London (Park Lane/Mayfair etc etc) before 11^th March to ensure they don’t get hit with a new tax. Or will he go even further, and will we see a reappearance of Boris Johnson’s hitherto specified aim of eliminating Stamp Duty below £500k, consequently theoretically saving homebuyers many thousands of pounds?

However, opinions are divided on what, if anything, will be included in the budget.

Most believe that the extra 3% for foreign nationals is an almost certainty, and if it isn’t implemented straight away, it will be in the Autumn Statement. Many believe the Chancellor could also decide to repay the favour to those in the North who turned the Election map ‘blue’ on the evening of 12^th December with actions to enhance the housing market north of the M62 with stamp duty changes. The best way he could do that is to raise the threshold from the current £125k.

When Boris ran for Tory leadership back in May 2019, he said that he wanted to expand the threshold at which you begin paying stamp duty from £125k to £500k, which when you consider 7 out of 8 residential sales in 2019 were for homes below £500k, that would have a considerable effect. If the Stamp Duty threshold had been raised to £500k in 2019, then 700,400 homebuyers in England would not have paid any Stamp Duty Tax.

97.4% of Huddersfield properties sold last year were below £500k

Of the 3,549 properties sold in the last 12 months in Huddersfield, only 91 of those properties sold were over £500,000 (interesting when compared with Greater London where 44.9% of properties were below the £500k level).

Yet the cost to the HM Treasury would be significant. If all properties below £500k were exempt, the government would lose £2.22bn in tax receipts according to Savills. Of course, this could be made up with extra tax on empty properties or increasing the second homes Stamp Duty levy from the current 3% to say 5%, which would raise an additional £1.12bn on top of the current £1.68bn it raises for the Treasury, yet it would have a negative effect on buy-to-let landlords buying additional homes.

What almost unquestionably won’t happen is the earlier idea of switching the Stamp Duty liability from homebuyer to home seller

this would stall the property market, would probably cause political fallout among 688,300 homebuyers who paid Stamp Duty last year alone, make homes ‘appear’ more expensive as house sellers would inflate the asking price to try and recoup some of the tax, yet ultimately could be seen as ‘re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic’.

The 3% additional levy for foreign buyers is almost certain (of which we don’t get many in Huddersfield – as they tend to buy in prime London areas which is of course the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, and parts of the boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, and Camden), yet I have a feeling that ultimately the Government doesn’t want to rock the boat on the wave that is being rode by the property market on the ‘Boris Bounce’ since December. I also doubt any changes will be made to first time buyer Stamp Duty relief, as 22% of all property transactions in 2019 were to first-time buyers, and whilst it cost the Treasury (or saved the first-timer buyers) a total of £539m in Stamp Duty relief (an average of £2,411 each), the Government are keen for first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder.

Ultimately, we can only wait until Mr Sunak opens his red leather box on 11^th March to find out what will happen. I will of course report back after 11^th of March on what (if any) changes to the tax regime will affect the Huddersfield property market going forward

Huddersfield Property Market – Is it Time to ‘Plan’ to Get the Builders In?

Even though the new legislation was placed on hold because of the recent General Election, it is expected the Government will start fining around half of all UK local authorities for failing to build enough new homes as Westminster starts to force local authorities to build more homes with the new laws.

The Conservative Government has gone on record with an ambition to build 300,000 new homes each year from the mid-2020s (aspiring as the average for the last 13 years has only been 177,000 pa). So Downing Street see the planning system as requiring root and branch change to ensure local authorities deliver on that promise.  The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s ‘Housing Delivery Test’, which should be launched on an undetermined date this year, will hold local authorities to account for ensuring they hit their own specific house building targets.

If a local authority is unable to show that it has a five-year stock of land for building new homes, it gives builders greater rights and liberties to build their new homes where the builder wants (not where the local authority wants).

This will mean there will be a house-building free-for-all

as the council will have less control over the setting, types of properties, contribution to infrastructure and location of any new home development.

Only 44% of local authorities have a local plan that is less than five years old.

Locally, Kirklees is in that 44% of local authorities, having had a local plan in place within the last five years.

Yet, the original question of this article was to find out if we are building enough homes in Huddersfield and the surrounding local authority area i.e. should we get the builders in? Well, the Government set targets for local authorities for the number of homes they should build each year. The latest set of data is for 2018, so for the three years up to and including 2018 i.e. 2016/2017/2018,

New home building target for Kirklees was 4,516 new homes, yet it achieved 3,399, a shortfall of 1,117 new homes

So, what does that all mean for the Huddersfield property market?

Even with the shortfall, there are positive and negatives to this. The Huddersfield property market is not broken, yet it does need to get the builders in. Irrespective of the results from the last three years, we have over three decades of under building, which has created issues regarding affordability of homeownership and older generations being stuck in homes too big because there aren’t enough suitable homes for them to move to, i.e. bungalows. The stabilisation of the General Election has been a net positive to overall confidence in the local property market, meaning Huddersfield homeowners and Huddersfield landlords looking to sell their home in the coming spring and summer will find decent demand (although sellers still need to realistic with their pricing).

Unfortunately, the negatives are that many Huddersfield renters that want to buy, are unable to as they can’t save after paying their rents and feel as if they’ve been left behind. I know the Government recently launched their “First Homes” scheme for selected first time buyers at the start of February, where a 30% discount would apply to “a proportion of new homes” and would be subsidised out of contributions from builders, the Tory’s have previously promised to build 200,000 cut price homes for first time buyers back in 2015, yet the National Audit Office has recently confirmed they never built a single one!

The simple fact is, we as a country need to build far more affordable homes in the areas where people want them. This means the dream of homeownership will be a greater possibility for our children and grandchildren in the future. Our local authority needs to continue to plan the housing needs (and associated infrastructure) to ensure that as we live longer and continue to grow as country - we have the homes in place to live in that are suitable for every generation.