Labour’s Response to the Housing Crisis

“And so, the Labour Party’s answer to the housing crisis is to increase the stamp duty that overseas investors pay to buy property in the UK. As you may be aware, I’ve covered this quite a few times, and in my opinion, it’s not about the stamp duty; it is about incentives and laws to direct overseas investments where it is needed.

It’s our country; we can decide where they can invest, not them. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have incentives for them to still invest here. By simply increasing the stamp duty for overseas investors, all we do is we literally lessen that investment, which won’t help anyone.

For example, as I’ve said previously, in Australia, overseas investors cannot simply buy property and use it to park their money. If they invest in property, they must generate more units than they are buying. The same could be done here. So rather than have 50 or 100,000 empty properties in and around London owned by overseas investors who have parked their ill-gotten gains in our cities, leaving so many properties empty, they could be forced to invest their money in developments.

It would actually, considering that Labour purports to be the party of the people, how about something really daring like encouraging overseas investors to invest their money with developers who are building less than 25 units at a time? Let’s support the small developers. What do you think the chances of that really are? I’m afraid the same old corrupt people, the same old lies, and the same old politics. I’d love to hear your thoughts.