Stamp duty punishing first-time buyers - research

In a week where stamp duty will headline as part of Gordon Brown’s Budget Day speech, Alliance & Leicester Mortgages found only 99,234 of UK properties in 2004 sold for less than the £60,000. This compares miserably to a decade ago, when homebuyers had a 60/40 chance of avoiding the tax with close to a half a million properties sold under the stamp duty threshold. Additionally, only 6% of typical first-time buyer properties, including flats or maisonettes, sold for less than £60,000 last year compared with 72% of properties sold under the stamp duty threshold in 1995, Alliance & Leic...