Marc Da-Silva

Yesterday's Emergency Budget attracted a huge response from the property industry. The What House? press team has been inundated with press releases, comments, statements and further requests for interviews.

Chancellor George Osborne unveiled the largest package of tax increases and spending cuts in a generation, but what does the housing industry think of today's announcements?

The Housing Minister Grant Shapps kicked off the Emergency Budget frenzy within factions of the housing industry at lunch time today when he announced on Twitter that he was "heading into House of Commons chamber so that we [the government] can start to sort out the historic mess Labour left the country in".

An hour later and the Chancellor George Osborne unveiled the largest package of tax increases and spending cuts in a generation, including a VAT hike from 17.5% to 20% in January.

Just one week after Jones Lang LaSalle published a report tipping Qatar, "a new global powerhouse", to rank as the number one global overseas investor in 2010, Land Securities has announced that it is selling one of its largest London property development schemes to Qatari property f

Chancellor George Osborne says that Britain is "on the road to ruin" unless drastic cuts are implemented to tackle the "awful financial situation" in the Budget tomorrow.

In a speech yesterday at an event hosted by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, housing minister Grant Shapps distanced himself from his predecessor John Healy, who said that falling levels of home ownership were "not such a bad thing", when he pledged to get a lot more Brits onto the housing ladder.

Shapps acknowledged the need to "build more homes" in order to make more people's aspiration of homeownership a reality.

First-time buyers and much of the housing industry would condemn the government if it failed to permanently raise the stamp duty threshold to £250,000 for first-time buyers, in accordance with the Tory manifesto.

Despite pledging to permanently raise the stamp duty threshold to £250,000 for first-time buyers, the new coalition government, led by the conservatives, has announced that it will appraise the merits of raising the stamp duty threshold for first time buyers, rather than provided the immediate help that is necessary.

After five days of political wrangling following an indecisive outcome at last week's general election, a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition government was formed on Tuesday.

We now know who the prime minister is, along with a range of other top cabinet jobs, but the new housing minister has still not yet been named. Perhaps the shortage of new build homes and high number of people on housing waiting lists are not of pressing concern to the new administration.

David Cameron, the man hoping to become the next Prime Minister, is calling on the Liberal Democrats to make a final decision over which party they will back to govern this country.

Yesterday, the Liberal Democrats opened formal talks with Labour, after Gordon Brown announced that he would resign as leader.

However, the Tories remain confident of gaining Liberal Democrat support to form a government, after they won the most seats at last week's general election but were short of an overall majority.

‘Every Little Helps' when it comes to building more affordable homes in this country, but news that Tesco plans to construct four "mini-villages" in the South East of England along with "mixed-use living and leisure" schemes in Ipswich and northeast England, is "nonsense", according to a Tesco spokesman.