Too little too late Darling!

With the credit crunch starting to kick in and affect homes all around the country and with the housing market which effectively feeds the economy at a virtual standstill, people have been asking the question for months. What are the government going to do about it?

In the last recession they scrapped the Stamp Duty on houses for a period of time. Stamp Duty is a 1% Tax that the purchaser pays on buying a new home. Depending on the cost of the home the tax rises to up to 4% for properties worth in excess of half a million pounds.

In reality the cost of buying a house has been rising for many years now at a rate that everyone has known would be unsustainable forever. Your property cant rise in value by 15-20% every year indefinitely.

Now the inevitable has happened. Costs have risen so incredibly high that first time buyers are unable to get onto the ladder in the first instance. The banks have stopped lending to anyone who doesn’t have at least a 20-30% deposit and this has caused the entire housing market to stall for some months.

The rumours that the government might scrap stamp duty once more has stumped the industry even further as many buyers and sellers hold off their sale or purchase hoping that they can save some good hard cash. Our little flat meant we had to cough up to the treasury over £3000. It’s a lot of money when you add that to the solicitors fees and stamp duty etc.

Of course, last year the government bought in the useless HIPs (Home efficiency packs) claiming they would speed up the process of buying a home. Of course the mortgage lenders and other bodies involved in the process don’t trust the packs and despite it being a legal requirement to have one (Thanks Gordon Brown) they are pretty much useless. In fact, adding hundreds more pounds to the cost of buying a home.

Today they have announced that they will scrap stamp duty on homes under the value of £175,000. I just did a search on Google and officially the average cost of a home in the UK is £ £219,262. So how exactly is this temporary one year freezing of stamp duty up to £175,000 supposed to help people in this country?

We only purchased our small one bedroom flat last year. We bought where we did as it was one of the few areas that we felt safe in and could actually afford to buy a home. So to further my research I did a Google search for the cost of an average London home. Some £371983. In fact looking through the newspapers at the New homes for sale, 1 bedroom flats are almost verging on the quarter of a million mark.

So 2 things to say to you Alistaire Darling and Gordon Brown.

1. Too little too Late
2. General Election Time please, time to get you out of there and someone more competent in place instead.