Removals firms tell of bookings chaos as stamp duty cutoff nears

A stampede to complete property purchases before the 31 March stamp duty cliff edge has caused a shortage of removals services, with more than 75,000 buyers forecast to miss the deadline and pay thousands of pounds more.

- Zoe Wood

Rightmove is calling for a short extension to the stamp duty deadline by the government. About 74,000 movers in England are predicted to just miss the cutoff, according to the property website, leaving them on the hook for a total of £142m in additional stamp duty.

The changes, confirmed in the autumn budget, are likely to affect several thousand buyers in Northern Ireland, where roughly 2,000 homes change hands each month. Scotland and Wales have different property taxes and are not affected.

"It's madness in terms of everybody who is trying to move in the last week of March," said Richard Dolan, the managing director of Greens Removals in East Anglia.

"When you make an announcement like this, you're creating pandemonium in the system," he said. "We are only dealing with clients who have got a completion date. There is a huge number of people that ring us every day and ask us, do we have any space?"