Both of which are to the detriment of buyers.

I'm seeing a tale of two markets at the moment in my work as a buyer's agent. There's the new homes market, which is flying, and then there's the second-hand market, which everyone wants but few can afford, because of the stamp duty.

Even with price tags ranging from 990,000 to 3m plus, new homes are selling out at the moment. We have a situation where a new home and a second-hand home, in the same location, with the same size garden, in the same condition etc, cost vastly different prices because typically people now pay 70,000 90,000 extra in stamp duty. Builders know this, so instead of pricing new homes at around a million, they're priced at 1.9m.

They know people don't want to pay stamp duty and so they add a premium to the new home price.

Stamp duty revenue has increased by around 700% over the past 10 years. Some reports suggest the government gets about 1bn from residential only and about 3bn in total. So I think it's time for the government to say, fine, we've done very well out of this but we need to start giving something back to buyers.

And they've tried to, but both the first-time buyer's grant and then increasing the thresholds led to increases in house prices rather than going back to the buyer for other things.

The problem with Michael McDowell's proposal on banding is it's giving back money at the start of the process, which could backfire as the buyer might still decide to hand it over to the vendor. You nearly need to protect buyers from themselves, from thinking they've all this extra cash to plough back into house prices.

And that's the problem. We don't want stamp duty changes to feed into the price of the house . . . further stimulating a very strong market and creating stagnation . . . in terms of people movement.

My proposal is to increase mortgage interest relief, say, on a biannual basis. That would be a way of giving the buyer something back. But on a drip-feed basis, so that they're not automatically seeing 20,000 or 30,000 to add to the house price.

A reduction in stamp duty on a gradual basis would also make the market work more effectively, it would bring back fluidity.

Because if people aren't able to trade up from a smaller property to a bigger one, then they're not going to sell their apartment and someone who's looking for an apartment in five years time won't have as much choice, unless we just keep building starter apartments.

We have to ensure movement in the property market or else it'll stagnate. And with so many young people starting families, we've a massive need for larger properties over the next few years. But these aren't being built. And with the cost of stamp duty, people are more cautious about moving up the ladder. By increasing mortgage interest relief as a compensation for the huge stamp duty lump sum, buyers will feel they're getting something back.

It's a payment mechanism that already exists and along with yearly indexing on the stamp duty thresholds, these two approaches could really make a difference for buyers, and in the longer term, for fluidity in the market.