That stamp duty changes will do little to help most first time buyers?

[Creambun2]

The housing market in the uk is totally dysfunctional. This is bad for the country on many levels. Many people are not having families due to housing situation.

Not enough suitable houses being built. No houses being built for social renting.

When many people cannot even thing about buying when price to earnings ratio is crazy.

I hope all the idiots who cream themselves about high house prices realise that eventually there will be a large market correction.

And certain boomers who shit on about "I worked hard and didn't have an iphone and avacado toast" and the reason that young people can't afford housing can fuck right off. Please don't expect any sympathy from young people of all your assets are taken for your elderly care needs.

Although I wouldn't ban [London weighting] because it would make the employees suffer
Only in the short term.

give travel allowances so people can live further out
That doesn't sound very eco-friendly. Move the jobs to the people, not the people to the jobs.

Erm some of us did work hard and go without new clothes for a few years to save a deposit. Everyone assumes my parents helped me. They are wrong. Im not saying it was easy but a lot of my friends think it's ok to maintain a certain lifestyle then whine they can't get a deposit together. Even when the price ratio wasn't so bad people still had to go without material things to afford to get on the property ladder.
Also people having a family waayyyy before they can afford a property, what on earth?! You can't have it both ways. Mortgage companies are clear they now take into account how many children you have for affordability reasons. And rightly so. Children definitely deplete my funds each month!
The only thing I will say is I think it should be taught in school how a mortgage works and what you would have to do in order to achieve it without parental help.
I started saving at 18 and got on the property ladder (whilst renting) at 24. So that's a long time saving and going without material things and I have many friends who refuse to do it.

At present, commuting Sheffield to Manchester is hellish. There just aren't enough trains, and the trains that do run are hellishly slow and overcrowded. This is absolutely ludicrous in this day and age.

To put it into some kind of perspective:

• 100 years ago, if you wanted to go from Wakefield to Bradford, the journey was nearly half an hour faster than it is today.
• Manchester to Blackburn was 8 minutes faster 100 years ago
• Trains connecting cities outside the south-east are 4 times slower than those in the south east
• Liverpool Central to Chester takes 41 minutes to travel 14 miles

I wasn't a homeowner in 1997, either, but can't deny that overall house ownership has become harder to achieve.

The ONS has some excellent stats comparing 1997 to 2016, how the earnings to property ratio has halved, so people have half as much income to try to buy a house with now.

OP is NBU, b/c the stamp duty measure is expected to only help about 3500 purchases per yr (I heard an analyst say). Which is not a lot, over all.

There are opportunities to encourage industry to parts of UK where housing is cheap, wrong to shrug & say it's free market why the SE has to be so crowded. This is a political failure by successive governments.

Also too many people in properties too large for their needs (in 3 yrs we will be guilty of this, too). How many individuals or couples buy just a 1 bed flat now as their starter home? Not buying or staying in a much more space than needed, would free up more housing stock for would-be buyers, too.

Many people are not having families due to housing situation

Really, I haven't read that anywhere.

Anyway OP, I doubt any debate about this will sway you as you seem to have come here for an argument.

For those genuinely saving for a house (inside and outside London) this will be of some help. No one really wants to pay tax to the Government on top of buying the house, solicitors fees, survey fees, removal costs. It just means buyers will be able to purchase more quickly.

Not buying or staying in a much more space than needed, would free up more housing stock for would-be buyers, too.

That's easy to say from the perspective of somebody just starting out though. The person living in a spacious home with a small (or not existent) mortgage will quite rightly say that they have worked hard to get where they are and have every right to enjoy living where they are - presuming you're not talking about LA housing? Our house is arguably larger than we 'need' and will become more so as the DC get older - but it is still our home that we love and worked hard for.

Anyway FWIW, I think the stamp duty changes will help. It is a start at least.

"hardwork" "enjoy where they live" etc.:
I can't wait to downsize, myself. I don't really understand other people, though. I'm already planning to get my arse in a supported home scheme before DC have to find me one. I will go willingly when it's time. And not leave them shitloads of my crap to sort thru, either.

I seem to listen a lot to other folk having to make difficult decisions about their elderly parents going into care, reluctant to leave family homes that their kids moved out of 30 yrs earlier, etc.

I'm convinced that retirement villages will be the next mis-selling scandal.

Well to have that level of people commuting they'd have to lol at the bloody season ticket fares. For both me and DP to commute from say, Milton Keynes, which was purposely built as a commuter town, it would cost us £5,000 each annually to get to work. With travelcards on top we'd be looking at about £7,000 each annually. Which would clearly make any savings we could make on moving somewhere cheaper (which we'd be fully prepared to do to own somewhere of our own) totally obsolete.

So it's all a big fucking mess of a myriad of issues, basically.

I meant 'look' not 'lol'. Although if I was the kind of person that 'lol-ed', season tickets would be a good place to start.

Someone has looked at the OBR figures on this.

Only around 3500 extra people will buy a house as a result of the changes.

The tax lost from all the other first time buyers who would have bought anyone, means that to benefit those 3500 people, its costing £900,000. Each.

Not only that, but the other first time buyers who think they are getting a wind fall aren't. Why? Because the OBR predicts it will merely push up prices, so they will have to pay more for a house.

This means it will make it harder for first time buyers in the long run and will benefit people who already own a home more.

When you think about all the other ways this money could have been spent, if the stamp duty was kept, it makes the policy look particularly bad.

For example: You could give 21,000 key service workers a £150,000 grant towards a property. Not a loan, a grant. Or you could build 21,000 houses for £150,000 for social rent - and get an additional return on the money.

But nope, we get a really rather unimaginative policy to try and grab headlines, which only helps a tiny number of affluent middle class people and changes fuck all else in reality. At great expense.

Yay for politics over efficient management of our national finances.

creambun2. Surely any help at all is welcome? If you feel strongly about it then write to your MP and demand it be re-instated. Given it was a Labour promise originally and is now a conservative promise, I don't think your opinion will be broadly welcomed though.

purits

We are already there on that one. It's been covered on BBC Moneybox a few times. People paying over the odds for an apartment in a supported living complex that's supposed to have lots of communal facilities but if they want to sell, no-one wants to buy it, even after huge price cuts, and the support, communal facilites and essential services like working lifts slowly start to disappear.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41200686

Too many people, not enough housing, taxes too low. Suggestions?

I fully expect all I have earned to be used to look after me for my life. That's what you work for.

It will only benefit a small minority of first time buyers, most in London, who are spending up to half a million pounds

Most first time buyers in the rest of the country already don't pay stamp duty

A lot of talk about improving infrastructure in the north and HS2 is happening. Meanwhile places like the SW and Wales have pitiful rail links with single points of failure and terrible communications infrastructure too. We should be pushing out jobs to these areas using technology but everything stays in the linked up SE.

I'm convinced that retirement villages will be the next mis-selling scandal

And the one after that will be equity release.

With a side order of Interest Only mortgages taken out by people failing to understand the meaning of 'interest only' getting to the end of the term with no repayment vehicle.

YANBU. It will just push prices up. All of the schemes to help first time buyers do. We need first time buyers to be priced out of the market so that house prices fall to more sensible levels. I would be happy for the value of my home to fall to help sort out the mess we're in currently.

What? Of course it helps. It's a chunk of money that they don't have to come up with/can put toward their deposit instead.

And I don't agree that it will push prices up. Homes that would be put on the market now for ~ £550k might be encouraged to put it on for £499k in order to be under the threshold and therefore more attractive to first time buyers.

I have a bigger problem with the extension help to buy which has roundly been criticised by many sides as a scheme which only really lines the pockets of the major housebuilders and pushes up house prices.
I think the government is more concerned about being seen to do something for housing in the UK rather than actually doing the hard thing and putting on thinking caps and making hard and not always popular decisions - nothing that happens in this term of parliament will make much difference in the short term but they could make policy that has long term benefits however politics is all about the short term and instant wins that help you stay in power/ get votes, housing policy needs to be long term and will probably take a long time to correct.

I agree wonky.

Part of that very difficult conversation we need to have is about land - who owns it, how we get it released for building. A sub-section of that land conversation is about betterment, and whether it might not be a good idea to tax (heavily) planning gain.

Whisky - but if you increase tax, people are less likely to sell their land for building.

Unless you're talking about forcing them to sell and pay tax or accept a lesser price - something that makes me v uncomfortable, as where do you draw the line? Would it be ok for a farmer to be told he has to sell his fields but you to keep your house just as you like it?