Rishi Sunak is facing a £50 billion hole in the nation’s finances. To fill it, he is looking at different groups of people and areas of the economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the housing market is being probed as a potential source of revenue. Capital gains tax (CGT) is once again on the cards for homeowners. This may have renters cheering but owner-occupiers are unlikely to be happy, particularly mortgage borrowers who are already facing a massive financial squeeze with rising interest rates.

Taxes on owner-occupation have been mooted before although not usually when householders face so many other difficulties such as rising fuel costs, rising food bills, rising mortgage rates, lower real wages and failing public services. On top of this, the housing market is not the same as it was in 1992, or even 2008. It has undergone structural change which means that tax and other policies will have unexpected impacts that wouldn’t have been an issue a few decades ago. The same policy may have a variety of contradictory impacts on different types of household.