‘I feel robbed by Labour after my stamp duty bill went from £350 to £7,000 overnight’

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Of all the emotions attached to buying a first home, anger should not be one of them.

But today I feel angry. My partner and I have missed the stamp duty deadline by just one day and our tax bill, which should have been £350, has jumped overnight to almost £7,000.

What was meant to be a joy-filled moment has turned into one of feeling robbed – by our own Government.

The hard-earned savings we had set aside for turning our new flat into a home, to pay plumbers and builders and buy furniture, are instead being frittered away. They will now go straight into the pocket of the taxman, to be spent on anything from public sector wage rises to a ballooning benefits bill.

Under the previous exemption introduced under Liz Truss in 2022, first-time buyers such as ourselves paid no tax on properties up to £425,000, rising to 5pc for anything over that.

From April 1 2025, this nil-rate threshold fell to £300,000, dragging thousands of homebuyers into paying stamp duty. Areas such as London and the South East, with their high property prices, are disproportionately affected.

We are buying in the capital, but we didn’t anticipate this would be the case for us. As first-time buyers purchasing a vacant flat from a buy-to-let landlord, it should have been a seamless transaction. Such was the confidence of our solicitor, our contract was even written up with the £350 stamp duty bill pencilled in.

But an inexplicably long wait for a response from the lender regarding a small query set us back at the very last hurdle. Enough that we will now end up completing on April 1 – just hours after the stamp duty deadline.

The realisation that we weren’t going to complete in time was sickening. For all of Labour’s talk of solving “black holes”, the money we’d carefully put aside was now seemingly being sucked into one.

What should have been a celebratory milestone has, despite our best efforts to see the bright side, been indelibly marred by factors out of our control.

A small comfort is that we are far from alone. According to Rightmove, some 74,000 are expected to have missed the deadline, putting them on the hook for £142m in additional tax. About a quarter of these are thought to be first-time buyers.

For a Government that has made cliff-edge tax rises its speciality, this hammer blow shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Already we have seen a devastating 20pc VAT slapped on private school fees, a near halving of the threshold at which employers pay National Insurance and a £1m cap on agricultural property relief.

Rachel Reeves has pulled so many rugs from under people, there is only a small corner of the population still standing.

However, the decision to ignore the looming changes to stamp duty thresholds and offer no reprieve to first-time buyers – those of us trying desperately to get a foot on the property ladder – smacks of hypocrisy.

Ever since the run-up to the election, Labour has been railing against landlords while promising to prioritise first-time buyers.

In July, the Prime Minister complained that “the dream of homeownership is out of reach for too many hard-working people”, while vowing to “turn the dream of owning a home into a reality”.

Last month, Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, who can hardly get through a sentence without mentioning “affordable homes”, promised “to give hope to Generation Rent”.

But with the average property price in the South East at more than £475,000, rising to £545,000 for a flat in London, it’s difficult to see how slapping a tax bill worth thousands offers any sort of hope to those renting.

In fact, quite the opposite. Mortgage brokers reported earlier last month that buyers were pulling out of deals after realising they could not move before the stamp duty deadline – something we too spent evenings agonising over when it became clear we’d miss the cut-off. Many first-time buyers, their finances stretched to breaking point to get on the ladder, simply don’t have a spare £7,000 for an unexpected tax bill.

This didn’t have to be the case. The stamp duty deadline was due to expire, and Reeves declined to extend it. First-time buyers and property experts were calling on her to extend the deadline, for even a short period – but this was callously brushed aside.

Yet if the Chancellor had done her research, she might have realised that we first-time buyers are pretty important for realising her dream of kickstarting growth. Getting us on to the housing ladder is crucial not only for personal financial security but also for the wellbeing of the economy.

Less wealth means less cash to spend. In our case, we have had to reevaluate how to decorate and furnish our new home with the savings we’ve got left. This inevitably means cutting back on big-ticket purchases – and spending less on things outside the flat too.

But of course Reeves isn’t likely to care. She might even be glad. Because while we may not be painting our walls or fitting a new wardrobe, she’s managed to squeeze an extra few thousand in tax from us. Another rug pulled.