BUDGET 2010: 92% of FTBs could have been helped last year
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The Council of Mortgage Lenders has estimated that around 92% of first-time buyers would have been exempt from paying Stamp Duty last year had the starting threshold already been raised to £250,000.
The trade body calculates that some 69% of home movers would also have been exempt in 2009.
Reports ahead of the Budget announcement today say that chancellor Alistair Darling is to raise the starting threshold for Stamp Duty to £250,000 for first-time buyers.
The CML says that under the £175,000 threshold in place last year approximately 73% of first-time buyers and 41% of home movers were exempt from the tax.
The government introduced the Stamp Duty holiday in September 2008, an incentive which temporarily raised the starting threshold from £125,000 to £175,000, and ran the scheme until December 31.
If the threshold was now raised to £250,000, the CML says this would result in benefiting approximately 350,000 households, including cash buyers.
It predicts the cost to the government would be somewhere in the region of £630m.
Over a full 12-month period, the number of those newly exempt borrowers would be around 450,000, at a cost to the government of around £800m.
The CML says this would add to the approximately 220,000 households expected to be exempt in 2010 - properties at up to £125,000 - and would mean that around two thirds of all transactions would be exempt.
