In Parliament this week
In Parliament this week we voted on the Government’s changes to Stamp Duty as well as the hugely important Retained EU Law Bill.
The changes to stamp duty, brought forward in the Stamp Duty Land Tax (Reduction Bill) on Monday is one of the few surviving announcements from the ‘mini-budget’’. The reduction in stamp duty will cost the Government a huge amount of money in lost revenue and the majority of those who benefit will be people who own second homes.
It’s important that we help first-time buyers get onto the housing ladder. But the housing crisis has been caused by a lack of supply. Lowering stamp duty will only increase demand while doing nothing to increase supply. Overall, that will increase the cost of buying a home for first-time buyers. In addition, the huge interest rate increase caused by the mini-budget has made mortgages far more expensive than they were before this intervention.
In Government, Labour would build more homes, introduce a mortgage guarantee scheme, raise stamp duty on foreign buyers and give first-time buyers first dibs on newly-built homes. I voted against the Stamp Duty Bill.
There were also important votes on the Retained EU Law Bill. This is a Bill that seeks to resolve the future status and relevance of retained EU law following the end of the transition period in December 2020.
The scope of this bill is huge, covering over 2400 pieces of retained EU law touching on areas as varied as environmental protection, food safety, vehicle standards and noise pollution.
The Bill gives enormous powers to the Government to repeal and amend important regulations. If passed the Bill will allow Government ministers to interfere with hard-fought protections for workers, consumers and our environment with next to no scrutiny. It’s clear that the Tories want to use Brexit as an excuse to roll-back on hard-fought rights. I won’t give them that chance, which is why I voted against the Bill.
|