Government reckons 95% of all first-time buyers who pay stamp duty will save,

while 80% will pay no stamp duty at all.

But it begs the question how many first-time buyers actually pay stamp duty?

Because, of course, in a lot of areas in the country,

it won't really reach the threshold with which they will start paying stamp duty,

because house prices are lower.

Yes, so the stamp duty kicks in at 125,000 pounds.

So if you were a first-time buyer and you are buying across vast swathes of the UK,

you will probably be paying maybe about 150,000 pounds.

And at 150,000 pounds under the old stamp duty rules before this exemption came in,

abolition, in fact, it's not an exemption, you would have only paid 500 pounds. So at which point,

saving 500 pounds versus the cost of buying a property is 500 pounds in your pocket, not 500 pounds in

the governments, which is good news for you, but it's not a huge amount of money.

If you go up to £200,000, you'd be saving yourself £1,500 from this, not to be sniffed at.

That's starting to be a more meaningful sum of money, but if you were raising a 10% deposit, that's £20,000, so £1, go up to 250,000 pounds though, you'd have been paying two and a half grand in stamp duty.

And then if you go up to 300,000 pounds, because of the way it works, you'd be paying 5 grand.

Now, keeping 5 grand in your pocket is not something to be sniffed at. And then as you go above 300,000 pounds, you'd still just save 5 grand, but you end up paying some stamp duty. Now, obviously, for a lot of people,

this won't save them a huge amount of money, but for people buying in the places where house

prices are the highest, and let us remember that that is not a benefit to those people. There's this

misconception. People buying in high house price areas are in some way benefiting. They're

not. They're suffering more than anyone else. And in fact, it's harder to buy there. If you go

around the country and compare prices to wages, it is harder to buy in London and the southeast

...