Andy Burnham Wants to Scrap Council Tax and Stamp Duty. Here’s What Would Replace Them.

Andy Burnham has set out his clearest tax position yet, backing a specific proposal that could have significant implications for homeowners and aspiring buyers, Antonia Medlicott explains what this could mean.

Of everything Andy Burnham has said about tax, this is the one area where he’s actually gone on record with something concrete.

He’s not just musing about wealth being under-taxed here. He’s backed a named proposal, from a named campaign group, with a named number attached to it.

So if you own a home, or you’re planning to buy one, this is the policy that’s most worth understanding properly.

What is Fairer Share, and what does it actually propose?

Fairer Share is a campaign group that’s been pushing this idea since well before Burnham became a leadership contender. Its proposal is called the Proportional Property Tax, or PPT, and the concept is simple even if the consequences aren’t.

Instead of Council Tax, which is still based on 1991 property valuations, and Stamp Duty, which you pay as one enormous lump sum when you buy a home, you’d pay a single annual charge.

That charge would be 0.48% of your property’s current value, recalculated every year. Second homes, empty properties and homes owned by overseas buyers would pay double, at 0.96%. The Bedroom Tax would go too.
So on a £250,000 home, that’s roughly £1,200 a year. On a £1 million home, £4,800 a year.

Because it’s based on current value rather than outdated bands, the regional effect is significant. Fairer Share’s own analysis points to a typical home in Newcastle facing a charge of around £860 a year, against roughly £1,300 in Manchester and closer to £2,700 in London.

Why Burnham likes it

Burnham has called Council Tax “highly regressive,” and the numbers back him up. Under the current system, someone in a £280,000 home in his own Makerfield constituency pays a higher effective rate of Council Tax than the owner of a £10 million mansion in Westminster.

Fairer Share’s research on this puts the effective rate at around 0.75% for the Makerfield home versus 0.02% for the Westminster one. That kind of gap is hard to defend once you see it written down, and it’s clearly part of why this has cross-party sympathy, not just support from Burnham’s own side.

He’s also drawn to the idea because it would abolish Stamp Duty, which he’s described as a tax that punishes people simply for moving.

London and the South East currently pay the overwhelming majority of Stamp Duty receipts, and Burnham has spoken separately about a Land Value Tax, an annual charge on land itself rather than the property built on it, as a way of taxing land left undeveloped or hoarded for speculation. It isn’t clear yet whether a future policy would be based on Fairer Share’s property-value model, a land value model, or some hybrid of the two.

Who gains and who doesn’t

Fairer Share’s own figures claim that around 77% of households, roughly 18 to 19 million homes, would pay less under this system, with an average saving of about £556 a year. Renters would benefit too, since the legal obligation to pay would shift entirely to property owners. That’s 8.7 million rented households no longer paying Council Tax directly.

The households facing higher bills are concentrated in high-value areas, mainly London and the South East, plus owners of second homes, empty properties and undeveloped land.

There’s a proposed cap of £1,200 on how much any single household’s tax bill could rise in year one, intended to protect people who are asset-rich but cash-poor, for example those who bought decades ago in an area that’s since become expensive, without the income to match.

If you can’t pay, the proposal allows you to defer the charge, with modest interest, until you sell.

The part I’d flag if you’re a landlord

If you own rental property, this shifts more onto you directly.

Currently, tenants are the ones who pay Council Tax. Under this model, that obligation moves to you as the owner, for both empty and occupied buy-to-let properties, at the same 0.48% rate.

Whether that cost gets absorbed or passed through to rents in practice is exactly the kind of detail that hasn’t been worked out yet, and it’s the first question I’d want answered if I had a portfolio.

What I’d actually watch for

None of this is government policy, and there’s no confirmed timetable. What’s changed recently is that a parliamentary committee has recommended the government consult on Stamp Duty alternatives before the end of 2026, so this has moved from campaign-group territory into something Whitehall is at least being asked to look at properly.

Six Labour MPs have already backed the idea publicly, and Burnham himself has said he thinks this is an area where “left meets right.”

But, its not all plain sailing. Fairer Share’s own modelling says this would raise a surplus for the Treasury while cutting bills for most households, largely by asking owners of expensive homes, empty properties, and land banked for speculation to pay a fairer share relative to what their property is actually worth. That’s an easy sell to the roughly three in four households who’d save money.

It’s a much harder sell in the exact places, London and the South East, where the most politically influential and often loudest homeowners live.

Whether a policy like this survives contact with that opposition, in anything like its current form, is the real question, and it’s one no amount of campaign-group modelling can answer for you.

If you’re weighing up a house purchase, a downsize, or how a second property fits into your plans, this is genuinely worth factoring into your timeline, even in its
current unconfirmed state. It isn’t worth restructuring your finances around yet.

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This article is for general information and doesn’t constitute personal financial advice. Property and tax decisions depend on your individual circumstances, and if you’re weighing up a purchase, sale or restructuring that could be affected by any of this, please speak to a regulated financial adviser before acting.

Sources:

• Fairer Share Campaign, FAQs and Proportional Property Tax proposal pages
• Fairer Share Campaign, written evidence to Parliament (TAC0020 and FSF 052)
• Fairer Share Campaign, “Burnham Wins Backing to Scrap Council Tax,” coverage of The i newspaper report
• The Negotiator, “Burnham explores major overhaul of property taxes”
• Plan Insurance Brokers, “Proportional Property Tax for landlords: what could the proposal mean for property owners?”
• Chartered Institute of Taxation, “Andy Burnham’s tax agenda: early signals for a probable premiership”