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Consumer Home
23 March 2006
The budget is "disappointing" for the housing market, claims building society Bradford and Bingley and the small rise in the stamp duty threshold will have no effect.
Raising the threshold on residential transactions from £120,000 to £125,000 will have no impact for first-time buyers, said chief economist of the building society, Peter Charles.
Organisations had called earlier in the week for first-time buyers to be exempted from stamp duty altogether, in order to get more of them on the property ladder.
The Council of Mortgage Lenders had a similarly pessimistic view, stating that although 29,000 households would have escaped stamp duty last year if the starting thresholds had been £125,000, around 56,000 households became liable for stamp duty in the period purely as a result of rising house prices.
"Although the stamp duty starting threshold has helpfully been raised, the number of buyers who would have escaped stamp duty last year as a result of the uprating is outweighed by those who became liable for stamp duty as a result of rising house prices," commented deputy director general of the CML, Peter Williams.
Mr Williams went on to say that the CML nonetheless welcomed the chancellor's commitment to shared-equity schemes and increased home-ownership.
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