Chris Bryant, Columnist

Britain Wants to Juice the Housing Market, Again

Stamp duty cuts have been tried before, sometimes with unhappy results for the buyers.

July 8, 2020 at 6:50 AM UTC

Chris Bryant is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for the Financial Times.

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Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

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The English are obsessed with owning property but Boris Johnson’s government worries that they’ve not been buying nearly enough houses lately. As elsewhere, the U.K. housing market was put into suspended animation for several weeks to help contain Covid-19.

Now Johnson’s finance minister, Rishi Sunak, plans to put a rocket under the market by temporarily scrapping transaction taxes — known as “stamp duty” — for homes that cost less than 500,000 pounds ($628,000). The change would apply to England and Northern Ireland (Wales and Scotland have separate rules).