The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) has reacted with disappointment to Gordon Brown's tenth Budget

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) has reacted with disappointment to Gordon Brown's tenth Budget.

The organisation feels that the chancellor's decision to raise the stamp duty threshold from £120,000 to £125,000 is insufficient and would be of no substantial use to first-time buyers.

"It's a mixed budget for property, offering little to first-time buyers and very little on the affordability of homes," said Milan Khatri, Rics chief economist.

"This budget misses another opportunity to address the problems of stamp duty and provide a fairer and more appropriate system that would truly assist first-time buyers."

Apart from the fact that Rics feels the threshold should have been raised to somewhere in the region of £150,000, it also stated that the chancellor should have changed the structure of stamp duty to avoid the clustering phenomenon occurring just below thresholds.