Last year’s government scheme exempting home buyers from Stamp Duty surpassed original Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) estimates. During this concession period, 57% of homebuyers were exempt from Stamp Duty tax.
In 2008 the government temporarily raised the nil rate thresholds for stamp duty to £175, 000, with the CML predicting that over half of all homebuyers would avoid Stamp Duty. During its peak in the first three months of the year, 57% of all mortgage buyers avoided the Stamp Duty tax.
According to the CML, it was those home buyers in London and the South-East that lost the most from the Treasury’s concession on Stamp Duty.
In 2009, before the Stamp Duty threshold was raised, the Northern and Yorkshire & Humberside regions both had the greatest proportion of exempt transactions or purchases under £125, 000, but in each of these regions this was still under half. A year later, with the higher threshold in place, over three quarters of transactions in the North were exempt from the house buying Tax.