82: Budget Update – Stamp duty surcharge for overseas buyers
BDB Pitmans
In our last blog post we reported on Theresa May’s announcement at the 2018 Conservative party conference, that non-UK purchasers of UK property would pay an additional amount of stamp duty land tax (SDLT).
Only a brief mention was made in Mrs May’s speech and the suggestion was that the charge would be between 1 and 3%. It was unclear whether it would, in line with other recent changes, only apply to purchases of UK residential property, not to commercial property.
No mention was made in Philip Hammond’s Budget speech on 29 October but there is a brief reference in the Budget Red Book published on the day which provides a bit more detail. The government will publish a consultation in January 2019 on a SDLT surcharge of 1% for non-residents buying residential property in England and Northern Ireland (Scotland and Wales have their own separate regimes for taxing land transactions).
We will of course need to see both the consultation document and the final form of the legislation but this short Budget paragraph does provide some certainty on the scope of the new surcharge for those planning future property purchases in the UK.
