Although I have only taken a cursory look, the measures would appear to be inadequate and likely to be long-term detrimental to the housing market.

The HomeBuy Direct scheme. Providing financial incentives for first-time buyers to buy the unwanted housing stock sitting on the developers’ books,  seems to have the immediate negative effect of making it more difficult for existing homeowners who want to move up the property ladder to sell their homes to FTBs.

0% Stamp Duty Threshold Raised to £175,000. Weak. Pathetic. Meaningless. The pernicious tax that is Stamp Duty should have been completed reformed. Greed stopped them. I guess the incumbents, though for how much longer they will have that title is open to debate, still think things will bounce back and the obscene amounts that came in pre-bust will start flowing through the door once more. It won’t. Wake up and smell the secular bear. It is a new game with new rules. Stop holding on to the past.

Councils Buying Unsellable Properties From Developers. So the taxpayer, one way or the other, is to fund the Nationalisation, that is what it is make no mistake, of the properties that actual buyers don’t want to buy.

Which makes me think that an awful lot of those “lifestyle” city centre flats could end up in Council hands. Given how many flats in certain blocks are unsold, we could be looking at the sink estates of the future. Blocks of flats filled with everything from the genuinely housing-list needy, to the latest migrant workers and, what I call, the benefitionados.

Just a thought, if you own a flat in one of those blocks now might be a good time to start panicking.

I think that the above also signals a potential body blow for buy-to-let. Not the death knell . . . yet.

There is more to the Government’s panic measures than the above. This is only a cursory review. But it all plays in to the Secular Bear in Homeownership that I have spoken about before and that, hopefully very soon, there’ll be a free downloadable report on.