- 05
- Mar
The chancellor has come under fire and been accused of missing an opportunity by not offering to help first time buyers struggling to get onto the property ladder. The reason for the criticism is that the chancellor decided not to the raise the level of stamp duty from its current level of £125,000.
In his pre-budget report the small print does refer to the possibility of reforms that might allow certain people buying their house through official shared equity schemes to escape paying the tax. Typically this would be public sector workers who increasingly find that their salaries are no match to what they could receive had they worked in the private sector.
A report released by the Council of Mortgage Lenders was released just hours before the Chancellor’s pre-budget report and it warned that first time buyers were finding issues of affordability increasingly difficult to deal with. With house prices having outpaced wages over the last decade and interest rates on loans and mortgages rising, first-time buyers are hard pushed to reach that bottom rung.
Many experts were surprised by the fact that the pre-budget report lacked a reference to stamp duty despite the fact that the Conservatives had pledged to remove it for first time buyers that are worth £250,000 or less.
Halifax has found that the average UK first time buyer now pays roughly £169,000 for their first home. On a property of that value they have to dish out an average of £1,688 in stamp duty, on top of the deposit, moving costs and first home loan repayment.
Some experts have argued that the removal of stamp tax for first time buyers was an ideal way of helping the thousands of people out there looking to get onto the first rung of the property ladder.
