Stamp Duty

[drplokta]

Apparently, the Tories have decided to raise the stamp duty threshold to £250,000 for first-time buyers only. Can anyone come up with a workable definition of a first-time buyer for purposes of this policy (remember that the taxman can't ask to see documents more than seven years old)?

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Someone who has not paid stamp duty on a house purchase before? Surely there are records of this?

[drplokta]

But if first-time buyers are to be exempt from stamp duty, then when they come to buy again they won't have paid stamp duty on a previous house purchase. And what about all the people who currently own houses that they bought for less than the stamp duty threshold? And how do you tell that the Miss A Smith who paid stamp duty on the purchase of 3 Acacia Avenue in 1985 is or is not the same person as the Mrs A Jones who currently resides at 5 High Street and is buying 1 The Meadows (apart from a national ID card scheme, which as well as its other problems can hardly be made retroactive)?

[drplokta]

Also, what about people who have previously owned houses in other countries, on which they have presumably not paid UK stamp duty?

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Clearly they've not paid stamp duty in the UK, so would qualify. There are always loopholes, why obsess about them?

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Presumably there will be a record that person X has claimed this tax relief so that they can't claim it again. There are already plentiful ID checks when buying/selling a house (passports are very useful for this) so I don't think an ID database is required, even if it did work.

No system can be made perfect, so we shouldn't assume that can be done here. Obviously avoidance of stamp duty through fraudulent claims of being a first time buyer will be a crime. So it's rather like any other form of tax relief, isn't it?