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Hello. Please help. I'm staircasing to 100% on my shared ownership property & have started to get solicitors costs. One of the big ones for me was Stamp Duty at £1400. I didn't remember it the 1st time around, so wondered what happened. I dug out my original docs & saw I paid none, but that a form had been sent, so I requested the original form back. My solicitor had filled it all in & I took it as paying them the big bucks they knew what they were doing. He had filled the value in at the 50% share price. Looking at the rules now you can do what's called a full market valuation meaning it should have been filled in at the full price & I would have paid £100 tax then & nothing now! This is majorly stressing me out. Do I have any options please as was never given this no brainer choice at the time.

Did you buy after December 2014? If not, this may not have even been an option.

Hello. Thanks for replying. It was June 2006.

Hello.

Lots of views but no ones really helped. The solicitor now has come back & said the original guy didn't give me the option back then & basically tough luck you've got to pay it now. Anyone know for sure if it was an option then or not. Even HMRC couldn't tell me! I will write them a letter but anyone in the know I'd appreciate the help?

Hello.

Lots of views but no ones really helped. The solicitor now has come back & said the original guy didn't give me the option back then & basically tough luck you've got to pay it now. Anyone know for sure if it was an option then or not. Even HMRC couldn't tell me! I will write them a letter but anyone in the know I'd appreciate the help?

I'd guess from A Goodman's reply that this should have been an option.

But your current solicitor is correct in that you cannot go back and change it.

You might have a claim against your previous solicitor (I have no idea on time limits) if they didn't give you the option. TBH though, I suspect trying to sue them after all this time is a very high risk strategy (unless you have proof they made a mistake - e.g. a letter from them saying that the other option wasn't available when it was)

But this is a taxation advice site rather than a legal advice site which is probably why nobody is replying.

Oh, and I've just looked up the SDLT rates for 2006/7. The tax couldn't possibly have been 100.

It was zero (up to 125k) and then a minimum of 1250 from 125001 upwards.

If you paid more than 62500 for your half share (even 1GBP more) then in the worst case you're only 150 pounds worse off now.

If you paid 70k+ for your half share then you're better off paying the SDLT on the other half with the current rules.

You said SDLT of 100 - today that would correspond to a mktval of 130000, so I guess the original price was 130k.

SDLT on that would have been 1300 back then.

So you're at worst 100 worse off and I think you've got no chance of proving you were badly advised.

Hello.

Did I work it out totally wrong then? I thought nothing up to 125'000 then 1% of the difference & as I paid £135'000 meaning £100?

At the time in 2006 SDLT worked on a slab rate system, not a slice rate like now. So the whole of the price would have been charged at one rate then. HMRC publish the rates for different periods. I expect it would have been 1% then if the figure was £135,000, so SDLT of £1,350.