Housing package 'limited'

02 September 2008

The Government has announced a number of measures to revitalise the housing market, but Shelter says the package is ‘dwarfed’ by the scale of the crisis.

Among the measures announced today are:

A ‘stamp duty holiday’, with the threshold at which 1% is paid raised from £125,000 to £175,000 for the next year.
A national mortgage rescue scheme to help families who are at risk of repossession avoid exploitation by unregulated mortgage rescue schemes.
A shared equity scheme to help first-time buyers, offering loans of up to 30% of the value of the property that they can use as a deposit.
Hundreds of millions of pounds brought forward for affordable homes.

While Shelter welcomed the announcement as a first step towards bolstering the housing market, chief executive Adam Sampson said the package was ‘limited’ in its scale:

‘The package of measures shows the Government is listening and trying, and taking all the steps that it could.

‘However, what has been announced will still be dwarfed by the massive scale of the housing crisis, and will be very limited in helping enough homeowners or turning the market around.’

Mr Sampson added: ‘The package will not help enough of the estimated 45,000 households set to lose their homes this year, the hundreds of thousands priced out of the market and the 1.6 million households stuck on the council housing waiting lists.’

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