Katie Lam is the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the MP for Weald of Kent.
At the last election, Labour promised to “ensure taxes on working people are kept as low as possible”. Who on earth do they think they’re kidding?
Over the past two years, they’ve introduced a new tax on family homes, targeted more property purchasers through Stamp Duty, hiked up council tax, and brought in a new tax on people who dare to use their hard-earned cash to go on holiday in England.
And those are just the taxes that Labour have created, or raised, in the brief that I cover – Housing, Communities, and Local Government. Across the board, Labour are addicted to taking more of people’s money.
When John Healey delivers the budget this afternoon, we’re almost certainly set for more of the same. Fundamentally, despite the new face at the top, nothing has changed. Spending is still out of control, the national debt is still growing at an absolutely sickening rate, and taxes are far too high. Labour MPs won’t let the Chancellor solve these problems, even if he wanted to – after all, their whole worldview revolves around taking, and spending, other people’s money.
So, like all Labour budgets, we can expect this one to bring more taxes, more spending, and more borrowing. It’s just what they do.
As Kemi said at Conference earlier this month, the next Conservative government is going to do things differently.
That starts with being willing to make difficult choices about what we’re spending, and where. As Helen Whately has rightly raised, far too many people are currently relying on welfare, when they simply don’t need to. The Government is spending tens of billions of pounds, taken from people who work, on those who choose not to. This is unsustainable, but it’s also completely unjust – if Conservatives believe in anything, it’s that those who work hard, take risks, and do the right thing should reap the rewards.
But just as important as bringing down our ballooning welfare bill is getting our economy moving again. A huge part of that is making it possible to build things – whether that’s fundamental infrastructure like roads and reservoirs, or homes in the places that people actually want to live.
At Conference, we announced our plan to cut the ideological Net Zero rules, which are adding £50,000 to the cost of every new build home. At the moment, rules imposed by the Government mean that people have to spend money that they don’t have on things that they don’t necessarily want – like EV chargers, solar panels, and expensive toilets.
But even if we make it cheaper to build homes in the places that people actually want to live, our tax system currently punishes people at every step of the journey.
If you want to buy a new house, you have to pay Stamp Duty, one of the worst taxes. In exchange for absolutely nothing, those buying a home have to stump up thousands of pounds extra – over £4,500 on average – every time they move.
That hits people who want to get on the housing ladder, people who want to move somewhere bigger so that they can start a family, and those looking to downsize in older age. At every stage of life, this tax makes moving more expensive – and so, unsurprisingly, far fewer people move than they otherwise would.
Which results, of course, in older people living in family homes that they bought decades ago, even when downsizing would suit them better. Young families, therefore, have fewer family homes to choose from, and so they stay in their starter homes – which means fewer starter homes for hard-working younger people.
Not content with taxing you when you move, Labour have also introduced an additional tax on people just for living in their own home. More than 100,000 homes across the country are subject to Labour’s Family Homes Tax, which sees people charged up to £7,500 a year.
And if all of that weren’t bad enough, the current rules around Inheritance Tax mean that there is yet another tax bill when people pass their home on to the next generation.
So it’s tax when you buy your home, tax when you’re living there, and tax when you pass it on. It’s intolerable.
The next Conservative government will get the housing market moving again – we’ll scrap Stamp Duty on those buying their main home, eliminate the Family Homes Tax, and exempt family homes from Inheritance Tax, as we transition to outright abolition of inheritance tax when the public finances allow it.
It’ll mean that more young people can get on the housing ladder in the first place and that, at the end of their lives, people will feel safe in the knowledge that their children and grandchildren can build the kind of property-owning lifestyle that they enjoyed.
Labour, of course, don’t believe in any of this. They don’t think that people really own the things that they’ve earned, and they don’t believe that people should aspire to own property at all. The vast majority of people in this country rightly disagree – those are our people, and we will back them every time.