Osborne’s vote-winner: stamp duty changes

Stamp duty changes in the Autumn Statement haven't made houses more affordable, says John Stepek. But it'll go down well with voters.

If you want to win the heart of the average British voter, it helps if house prices are going up. It's the one measure of economic prosperity that almost every homeowner genuinely cares about or understands.

Politicians realise this only too well for example, the best line of attack the Tories could come up with in the recent Rochester by-election was to warn that a win for Ukip would hit house prices in the region. The Tories still didn't win but it might conceivably have reduced theUkip majority.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.