Osborne to Increase Stamp Duty on Buy-to-Let, Second Homes

But… Osborne said the Government will also stop paying housing benefit and pension credit payments to people who’ve left the country for more than a month. The properties will be available to households earning less than £80,000 outside London and £90,000 inside the capital.

London property has been a great investment for those with plenty of spare cash, thanks to a limited number of new homes and strong demand, fueled in part by foreign buyers looking for a safe place to park their money.

London Help to Buy scheme to offer interest-free loan worth up to 40% of the value of a newly built home (and of a value of up to £600,000).

Of those, 200,000 will be so called “Starter Homes”, which will available to first-time buyers at a 20 per cent discount compared to market value.

The plans include 8,000 specialist homes for older people or those with disabilities.

“First time buyers have been struggling the most so this support announced for them today is vital”. Unless we see a massive uplift in apprenticeship training in our industry, there won’t be enough pairs of hands to deliver more housing on this scale.

Delivering his annual Autumn Statement and five-year Spending Review to the House of Commons, Mr Osborne said he would still be able to hit his target of eliminating the deficit and achieving a £10 billion surplus by 2020, while reducing the welfare bill by £12 billion over the period.

“What we do want to see, however, are house prices that continue to steadily rise, as that is a clear indication of a robust market – as well as a market that is a fair one for all buyers”.

We are seeing it today with what one of his colleagues describes as the government “raising the affordable housing budget but also redirecting it to homes for sale rather than rent”.

Mr Osborne said that the government’s Help to Buy Shared Ownership scheme would remove the current restrictions on who can buy a home through the scheme from April 2016.

The Chancellor also announced plans to tackle people buying second homes and properties for renting out, which he claimed lead to a “squeezing out” of families trying to get on the housing ladder. Up to £60m will go to communities in England where the Treasury says the impact of high numbers of second homes has been “particularly acute”. Instead, there’s the feelbad factor of generation rent, paying half or more of their income to their landlord. We’re already seeing housing developments starting to stall because the cost of hiring skilled tradespeople is threatening to make some sites simply unviable.

Faced with some hard decisions regarding public spending cuts, the Chancellor chose housing by prioritising investment in new affordable homes.

New starter homes cost up to 450,000 pounds in London – 11.5 times the average London salary, Shelter estimates.

LONDON, Nov 25 Britain’s top share index advanced on Wednesday, as investors warmed to housebuilders ahead of Finance Minister George Osborne’s planned increase in spending on the housing sector.

The scheme has proved more popular in other areas of west London, with 459 sales to first time buyers over the two years.

Simon Checkley, managing director of brokers Private Finance, said given how buy-to-let returns stack up, the figures show this tax increase can be accommodated.