Rishi Sunak’s stamp duty holiday has been credited with reviving the property market and blamed for stoking house price inflation, but what has been its effect on the public purse? Remarkably, far from reducing receipts it has actually modestly increased them. In the first quarter of 2021 the public coffers swallowed one per cent more income from stamp duty than they did in the first quarter of 2020, before the holiday was announced on 8 July last year.