One recent November afternoon, Kirstie Allsopp turned up at Portcullis House, a seven-storey newbuild semi with generous square footage, situated in the desirable central location of Westminster. South-facing or, more accurately, going south. No garden, but you could knock the bulletproof glass ceiling through and bring those taxpayer-funded fig trees back. Oh, but you’d have to evict the 650 squatters first.
This was Location, Location, Location: Parliament Edition – where the peculiar national pastime of obsessing about home ownership met the even more peculiar national pastime of politicians having no idea what to do about it. And Allsopp, Britain’s most vigorous telly estate agent, was the ideal conduit. MPs on the Treasury Select Committee had called her in to sound out a better way to tax property than, erm, council tax bands pegged to valuations made in 1991.
Wrapped in a scarf the colour of artisanal terracotta brick (£99.36 per square metre), Allsopp looked ready at any minute to greet a couple from Basingstoke for a viewing of the committee corridor (“Ignore the old-fashioned decor,” she might suggest, when faced with a particularly stern portrait of Theresa May).
“We have to be very careful not to see buying property as a sin, because at the moment it’s a sin tax. It’s like cigarettes and alcohol and first-class travel,” she told the politicians, regarding the “upsetting” system of stamp duty. “We should encourage it… We know that it is an economical positive to encourage people to move house” – and also, say, the premise of house-buying shows like Location, Location, Location. Please, let’s not create a tax that results in even more reruns.
Allsopp’s main concern seemed to be that owners of expensive houses were disincentivised from moving into even more expensive houses. She lamented: “The absolute top price bracket – we’re talking £1.5m and above… They are just not selling.” The committee chair, Meg Hillier, appeared unmoved. Had Allsopp seen the same at “the lower end”? “No, I haven’t.”
Allsopp also had grave warnings about proposals to address housing inequality in Britain. Making landlords (who don’t pay National Insurance or their tenants’ council tax) pay their way? “We have to have a more positive attitude” to landlords. “When you seek to increase the burden on landlords, you have to be very careful to remember it’s not like other income schemes… It’s not a passive investment.” A proportional tax based on the value of a property? “We have to be very careful about doing anything that deters people from improving their properties,” Allsopp warned, after minutes earlier suggesting people “altering two and three-bed houses” instead of upsizing is “damaging our first-time housing stock”.
“I have been in the same area, in the same home, for 20 years. Obviously… there have been lots of times I would have liked to move, but in recent years the stamp duty basically swallowed up my entire refurbishment budget.” It’s a cautionary tale from the sharp end of the housing crisis, which, incidentally, threatens the basis of the home-improvement show Love It or List It.
A mansion tax? “Not a good idea,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the following week. “Because what is happening is that the top end of the property market has completely stopped… It’s just a political tool to say, ‘Look, I’m bashing the rich.’”
Allsopp has a reputation for provocations. See the national reckoning she triggered with her disgust at washing machines installed in kitchens, or the outcry from overly online pensioners when she suggested on X that the former children’s laureate Michael Rosen was too well-off to use his Freedom Pass. She is also a fellow of the Smashed Avocado School of Economics, having blamed wannabe homeowners for failing to cut out expensive coffees, Netflix subscriptions and gym memberships to save for a deposit.
But when she sees the aspiration of home ownership as something to protect over all other ends, she is, in fairness, speaking for the public. We are a country obsessed with property TV (I checked the listings on the day of Allsopp’s select committee appearance: there were six property programmes on terrestrial channels alone). Sitting cold and broke in our under-insulated, overpriced homes, we watch mysteriously budget-free dreamers on Grand Designs and feel in our mouldy bones that one day this could be us.
Successive governments have been too frightened to touch the regressive council tax system (whereby Hartlepool dwellers pay more than their counterparts in Westminster) because of the toxicity of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax or the spectre of a mansion tax. The latter was a Labour policy during the 2015 election campaign that was found to be unpopular on the doorsteps of houses nowhere near the proposed £2m taxable mark. Even the socialist MP Diane Abbott told me at the time that voters “were worried about the mansion tax. Because it kind of felt arbitrary to them.”
We know the system is unbalanced, but we see ourselves one day kicking our feet merrily at the top of the seesaw. Kensington and Chelsea resident Kirstie Allsopp’s tales of housing market woes may sound unrelatable, but they are the bedtime stories we tell ourselves each evening in front of the TV set.
[Further reading: Labour has given up on integration]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes