If you think the government is sucking us dry with excessive stamp duty now's your chance to act

- Sign the stamp duty petition
- Send the petition on to a friend

Buying a house is an expensive business. Add up all the costs associated with moving and you will be shocked. Taking away the not so insignificant cost of actually buying the property and you are still left with a plethora of other costs to meet.

There are the estate agent fees, the removal costs, the mortgage arrangement costs - to name but a few. However, outside of the actual purchase price, it is stamp duty that is, for most people, the most significant cost. And, it is a cost for nothing - very frustrating.

At AOL we are determined to try and do something about this and have launched a petition with our mortgage partner charcol.co.uk to make stamp duty much fairer.

We realise that we have very little chance of getting the whole thing scrapped, but we think we could convince the government to structure the tax better. The current set up sees massive distortions around each threshold and minor increases in these just compounds the situation further. It is time for a radical overhaul.

So please visit our petition and help us change an unfair system