The good and the bad of Osborne's new property taxes

The chancellor's plans for new taxes on property are likely to distort the housing market, but will also close some long-overdue loopholes.

So there we have it. There isn't going to be a mansion tax. And there isn't going to be a rise in top rate council tax as a proxy for a mansion tax.

But there is going to be a sudden rise in top rate stamp duty for houses that cost over £2m. That's going to make transactions look really expensive. A mansion tax would have been charged only on the part of the value of the house over £2m. So the owner of a £2.5m house would be hit up for whatever the tax would have been (say 1%) on £500,000 not on £2,500,000. So a bill of £5,000.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.