I still can’t get my head around the maths of the £615m which the government has promised to spend on its stamp duty holiday for those buying a home worth between £125,000 and £175,000.
The figure suggests that – at about £1,500 per home-buyer – about 30,000 people will be helped every month.
But the TOTAL number of mortgages taken out in whole of the UK in July was 33,000. Do they expect the market to suddenly pick up….or do they secretly think this will be a cheaper measure than suggested?
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Jim Pickard joined the lobby team in January 2008. He has been at the Financial Times since 1999 as a regional correspondent, assistant UK news editor and property correspondent.
Kiran Stacey is an FT political correspondent, having joined the lobby in 2011. He started at the FT as a graduate trainee in 2008, working on desks including UK companies and US equity markets before taking over the FT's Energy Source blog.
Elizabeth Rigby, the FT's chief political correspondent, joined the lobby team in September 2010. Elizabeth has worked at the FT for more than a decade and was most recently its consumer industries editor.
Helen Warrell is the FT's UK reporter, covering home affairs, crime and policing. She joined the FT in 2008 and has spent time as a reporter in the Brussels bureau and more recently, editing the paper's Asia coverage on the world news desk.
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