Sunak has just proposed 0% capital gains tax if you sell to a tenant. If you don’t think that this will be abused I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Transactions on properties pregnant with capital gains will be structured as a tenancy to the purchaser followed by a sale. I suspect they will also agree a lower price, sharing the capital gains tax saving whilst also saving Stamp Duty in the process.

These kind of tax measures create strange distortions in the market, that benefit no one. To give a current example, most commercial property transactions are sale of companies containing the property, not the property itself. That’s because a purchaser pays circa 5% stamp duty land tax on a property, but just 0.5% stamp duty on a purchase of shares.