A stamp duty holiday is a trap. The Treasury knows it
Every cut in the past twenty years has gone straight into prices. This one will too
The Treasury has a model. It has had the same model for twenty years, and it says the same thing every time: cut stamp duty and the saving goes to the seller, not the buyer, within about eighteen months.
Ministers know this. They also know that a holiday polls well, photographs well and can be announced in a sentence. That is why we are about to have another one.
If the government wants more people to buy homes, it needs more homes. There is no shortcut through the tax code, and there never has been.
Marcus Oyelaran is a Daily Meridian columnist