I am representing the RICS but I did not write the evidence—I am standing in for Hew Edgar. I have a personal view and a RICS view.
My personal view of the bands is that I am not sure in which parts of Scotland £750,000 is the cost of a normal family home. If we simply look at people’s average incomes—even double them to £50,000 or £60,000 and multiply that by what people can borrow—those people can maybe get £250,000 or £300,000, and they may have a couple of hundred thousand pounds as a deposit. If we look at people’s real lives, anything over £500,000 starts to become a really significant price for a property, and we are not really looking at normal people who have normal incomes, to put it in layman’s terms. For that reason, I am not that concerned about the sector above £750,000.
However, once we get above the price where we start to pay more compared with the old tax and with what people pay in England, which is round about three hundred and something thousand pounds, there is a really serious impact on what happens in the market. If somebody considers moving from a £300,000 house to a £500,000 house, which they could maybe afford with a couple of average incomes and some equity in their properties, the stamp duty of £30,000 or £20,000 becomes almost equivalent to one of their salaries. That is the area of the market that the RICS has focused on.
The upper end that we are talking about is not really the £1 million properties, although it all filters down, to a degree. There may be only a few hundred people who can buy properties above £750,000, but we still need people to move into that sector when they get lucky in life and can afford it in order to free up the market at the £400,000 or £500,000 mark. There might be some issues about that. Personally, I do not have the money for the extra stamp duty to move from a £400,000 house to a £500,000 house and I would be in that situation if I moved.