LAHORE: Transfer fee, stamp duty to be cut - Property purchase
By Intikhab Hanif
LAHORE, April 16: The Punjab government decided on Friday to substantially reduce stamp duty and transfer fee on purchase of property, and remove disparity in the property tax being charged
on the owner-occupied and rented premises to encourage the housing sector.
It also decided to give legal rights to owners of property (only tenants currently have such rights), introduce separate rent controllers to decide rented property disputes, allow only development authorities and district governments to approve building plans, and permit acquisition of private land only to the genuine developers.
The decisions were taken during a high-level meeting, which was presided over by Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi. The chief minister constituted a committee under Law Minister Muhammad Raja Basharat to see as to how the decisions could be implemented after amendments to the relevant laws. The committee has been asked to submit report within a week.
Provincial revenue, excise and cooperatives ministers, board of revenue senior member, colonies member, secretaries of cooperatives, housing, law and excise departments, and the LDA director-general are on the committee, which also has members from the private sector.
According to official sources, the chief minister had asked the committee to study all the related laws and suggest as to how these could be amended to implement the decisions taken in the light of the directions of President Gen Pervez Musharraf to all the provinces.
They said Mr Pervaiz Elahi had decided to considerably reduce the transfer fee and stamp duty on the transactions of property to encourage people to invest in the housing sector. The reduction would expand the net of these taxes and, therefore, there would be no reduction in the income, they added.
The chief minister had also decided to bring about changes in the Rent Order to provide legal rights to the owners of properties so that their tenants could not exploit them.
The decision to introduce independent rent controllers in each district was taken in view of pendency of hundreds of rent cases with courts, which normally kept pending rent cases because of their pre-occupation with other cases, giving benefit to the tenants unwilling to settle terms with the owners of the rented property. The rent controllers would exclusively deal with those cases and decide those in a stipulated time, decided the chief minister.
The sources said he expressed his concern over the approval of building plans by numerous agencies and held that this was eroding the government's control over the standard of construction. "Buildings are being constructed without proper fire-fighting systems and other necessary requirements," he was quoted as saying.
To streamline the process, the chief minister had ordered that only the district governments and the development authorities, like the LDA, would approve the building plans and the union or tehsil councils would have no authority in this regard.
He also asked the committee to devise a system through which the government could protect people against exploitation by certain cooperative housing societies minting money by purchasing their land at nominal prices and then selling it at exorbitant rates.
The province had recently banned the purchase of land by the cooperative housing societies, but the chief minister said the government would allow it only to the genuine ones.
The real developers would be given all the facilities. Similarly, the land acquisition law would be allowed to be used only for the promotion of the housing sector and not for the benefit of the vested interest, he said.
The chief minister constituted another committee, headed by the chief secretary, to allow construction of high-rise buildings in sensitive areas. Under the law, buildings of only a specified height could be built on The Mall, near the Governor's House and other such public buildings.
