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14/7/25 8:13 pm
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A Conservative government would abolish stamp duty on primary residences but not for second home purchasers or landlords, leader Kemi Badenoch has revealed during her key conference speech.
Badenoch said: “Our housing market is not working as it should – there is a big barrier in the way [which is] stamp duty and the next Conservative government will abolish [it].
“So I have looked at the stamp duty thresholds to see where we can change them and looked at the rates buyers have to pay to see if we can lower them – and I have decided we can’t.
“Because that simply wouldn’t be enough – so the next Conservative government will abolish stamp on your home.”
Calling the tax ‘un-Conservative’ we added that “we must free up our housing market, because a society where no one can afford to buy, or move is a society where social mobility is dead”.
Several Tory MPs chimed in, including Andrew Griffith who said that “stamp duty has plagued Britain since labour introduced it in 2003 – it cant be reformed and it can’t be tweaked; it has to go.
“We will abolish stamp duty and stop penalising those who want to own a home, build a family or to downsize.”
Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, says: “The impact that abolishing stamp duty would have is largely dependent on what replaces it, given that residential property transactions currently generate £10.4bn for the Treasury. Of that sum £5.5bn comes from people’s primary homes, with £2.6bn of the remaining £4.9bn coming from the underlying rate of tax on investment second home purchases.
“If, and this is a big if, it is a simple tax giveaway, the likelihood is that the current stamp duty bill simply passes through into prices.
“On that basis, that would indicate an uplift in house prices of around 1.4% to 2.1% on average or £5,100 to £7,500 depending on exactly how it is implemented. However, given the way stamp duty works, this would be unevenly distributed across the country's housing stock with a much greater impact on high value homes, meaning London and the South East would benefit most.
“It is difficult to model what it would do to transactions, but it should free up transactions, especially among the groups that bear the biggest exposure to taxes. With the reliefs already available, it would have the least impact on first-time buyer numbers, with much bigger impacts on mortgaged home buyers and downsizers.
“The impact on investors and second homeowners will be much less, depending on whether they also benefit from a reduction in the underlying rate of tax.”
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