Aditya Chakrabortty – Let’s stop lining housebuilders’ pockets and tax them instead

Summary:
Jeff Fairburn’s £75m bonus has sharpened focus on the vast windfalls generated by help to buy In Austerity Britain, this may be the single biggest giveaway to one small group of businesspeople – and it gets barely any attention. The scheme may have helped some first-time buyers on to the ladder, but by inflating prices, it has kept many others off. Add to it quantitative easing and the erosion of stamp duty, and the British state has looked after housebuilders like no other. What it certainly has done is help Fairburn and his company, as a look at its latest annual report confirms. Strip out Persimmon’s comparatively small executive homes business, and two out of every three private houses it sold last year were bought with the assistance of the Tories’ help to buy. Without that

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