Feedback from The Putney Paper

I've already started receiving comments and questions arising from the Autumn edition of the Putney Paper, still being delivered around the constituency. One constituent emailed me about the feature on the housing crisis. He made the point that my ideas about raising the Stamp Duty threshold (since imitated by the Conservatives!)weren't radical enough: that to really help Putney residents we needed an exemption far higher than £250,000.

He's partly right. The problem is that the housing pressures in London are so much worse than the rest of the country because it's so much more expensive living here. The consequence of a national Stamp Duty threshold at £250,000 - for first-time buyers only - as the Conservatives now propose is that in parts of the country that buys people a very large house; in Putney it may just about get you an ex-local authority flat in a tower block. I think they're wrong both to apply the policy nationally and only to first-time-buyers.

It's surely crazy to come up with one-size-fits-all policies like that when the country isn't one size. So my response to the constituent who contacted me was that yes, £250,000 is the absolute minimum we should be looking at locally.

But I also believe we need to increase the Stamp Duty threshold incrementally, to allow the market to absorb the changes. My worry is that if all that comes of this idea is that sellers simply increase their sale prices to match the amount buyers save by not paying Stamp Duty, the policy fails. So we need to be measured. But rest assured: my five point housing plan represents just the start of what we need to do to address this massive, complex problem - and over time, given the chance, I'll be building on these ideas.