3%

As regular readers know I'm in the process of trying to move house. Despite being in an area of the South East where house prices have generally held up, as demonstrated by the rapid increase of new builds in my area, the market in my case is somewhat slow - and for one good reason, according to my feedback from estate agents - fucking stamp duty.

Now, I'm not moving house because I want to nor necessarily for profit - I love my current house - it's a necessity. Sadly Mrs TBF is struggling, due to health reasons to make the stairs and very soon it will no longer be an option. A move to a single story property is therefore essential.

The difficulty is my house comes over the £250,000 (3%) threshold but not worth enough not to be a problem. Wonderful. That results in potential buyers being very reluctant to pay the significant duty increase in order to purchase my house - thus stalemate. This has ultimately distorted the market - making my house too cheap or too expensive. There are, of course, ways of navigating around this which unintentionally puts me into more murky territory than Jimmy Carr, through no fault of my own. Thus I couldn't agree with Martin Lewis more:

I hate stamp duty. It’s not that I object to a tax on purchasing property. It’s this distortive tax that has absurd cliff hangers meaning an extra penny on a house’s price can cost thousands.

So when Osborne talks about more aggressive measures on stamp duty avoidance in a populist attempt to clamp down on the rich using loopholes there seems to be silence when it comes to those who aren't so well off and are forced to 'avoid the tax' as a necessity. And at the same time he wants to try to promote a strategy for growth - not moving because of 3% surely equals 0%?

He hasn't a clue.