Autumn budget 2017: Hammond scraps stamp duty for first-time buyers for homes worth up to £300,000 – live updates

Rolling coverage as chancellor Philip Hammond delivers the 2017 autumn budgetThe key pointsStamp duty help for first-time buyers£28m for Grenfell supportGrowth forecasts cutFuel duty frozen£3bn more for Brexit 2.00pm GMT Jeremy Corbyn is responding to the budget now. He is withering, and particularly critical of the lack of extra spending on social care and education. We will publish lengthy extracts from his speech a bit later when we have the quotes. 1.56pm GMT Well, that wasn’t quite as boring as some people were expecting. Philip Hammond has a reputation for being rather humourless, but he injected far more jokes than is usual for a budget speech and he managed to conclude with a surprise stamp duty announcement likely to play well with the tabloid press. Whether or not abolishing stamp duty for first-time buyers will actually bring down prices is an entirely different matter; if anything, it seems just as likely that it will allow sellers to increase prices. And, in cash terms, it is not a huge giveaway. The red book has just landed on my desk, and that shows that this will only cost the Exchequer around £600m a year over the course of this parliament. This was the headline-grabber at the top of a package of measures that otherwise sounded pragmatic but relatively unambitious. Will this be enough for the budget to be judged as a success (by the low expectations set in advance)? It is too early to know, but it does seem possible. Continue reading…
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