I start by welcoming the service accommodation proposals. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) on the short-term gain taken by the Ministry of Defence
and the Treasury in a bid to shore up the finances of the Major Government, which did them absolutely no good in the 1997 election. Service personnel and their families have been suffering from the impact of that ever since.
On the basic question of the stamp duty measure, I suppose that it could be welcomed, superficially, as a reversal of the intergenerational transfer of wealth, but in fact, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) said, the reverse is the case, as the main beneficiaries will be the existing owners of housing. In a tight housing market with a large amount of stock and limited flow, the net effect of adding extra liquidity into the system is most likely to be an increase in the price of housing.
The other beneficiaries will be not just individual householders who seek to trade down, or even up, but private sector landlords who have been buying up property and forcing up prices. Many youngsters are not able to get together the sort of deposit that is now required unless they can go to the bank of mum and dad. With the average house price in London at nearly £500,000, they are having to find a deposit of some £50,000. We are targeting a considerable public subsidy towards one small group without actually dealing with the problem.
It was very instructive that the Minister was unable—or probably unwilling—to give the figures I asked for about how much the measure will cost in aggregate and how the costs will break down by region. It is inconceivable that such analysis was not carried out as the policy was drawn up and ground through the mills of the Treasury. To save me from tabling a parliamentary question, I urge the Minister to come up with those figures in his winding-up speech. I think that the figures will show a considerable disparity between regions, which is not uncommon under this Government, much as they seek to hide it. Just recently, a letter from the Secretary of State for Transport told us that we had it all wrong and the average spend on transport was roughly equal between the north and the midlands, and London and the south. The only issue was, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham found out, that the Government had omitted to include the £32 billion—I believe that is the figure—for Crossrail from the London figures, because that had somehow been designated as a national scheme.