The whole industry has been crying out for some movement on stamp duty, and I’ve been pretty vocal on the issue myself. So I’m not going to criticise the chancellor for raising the threshold to £500,000 last week.

It’s a shame it’s only temporary, and is not yet, at least, part of the wholesale review of stamp duty we have heard so much about from Team Boris.

That said the policy is clearly designed to give a short-term boost to the market, rather than being a long-term fix. And by putting a fixed end point on it, I’m sure the chancellor will succeed in getting lots of otherwise reluctant buyers back to market, looking to take advantage of what is a fairly brief window of opportunity.

But for many people struggling to save for a deposit, stamp duty is only half the story. For perfectly understandable reasons, the last few months have seen a massive reduction in the range of high-LTV products available for first-time buyers, and this means that, stamp duty or no stamp duty, they are going to struggle to raise the deposit needed for a place of their own.

Helping the right people

It is worth pointing out that one of the main factors that makes it so difficult for first-time buyers to save, is the high levels of rent in the private rented sector. This, too, is in part a function of the high levels of stamp duty imposed on higher-value and buy-to-let properties, along with other tax changes that have been aimed at landlords, but inevitably end up hitting tenants.

Nonetheless, the government needs to make it clear to bigger lenders that they are expected to play their part. There is no point in cutting stamp duty if the very people it is intended to help are in no position to take advantage of it.

The big banks benefited directly or indirectly from the huge bailouts handed out after the financial crash little more than a decade ago. They owe society a big debt, and now is the time they can start to repay it by bringing 90% LTV loans back to the table.

This is not asking for an act of charity: it is in the big banks’ interests, every bit as much as it is for brokers and borrowers, to get the property market functioning again.

They cannot afford to sit idly by and hope that the fiscal measures unveiled by Rishi Sunak will do the trick: they need to step up to the plate and play their part in delivering the recovery.

John Phillips is national operations director at Just Mortgages