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Oil price rises, food price increases, greater tax bills and (even) the increase in the cost of your daily newspaper. These are all things that are generally accepted as being bad. We are allowed to tut and shake our head ruefully when we hear about them.

But increased house prices. That is labelled as good. Suggest property prices should fall and you will be thrown out of the dinner party of even your most dearest friends.

One of the reasons why the retail prices index should not be accepted as the proper measure of inflation is because we need to think of hikes in council tax, financial services or mortgage payments as an inflationary pressure, which the consumer prices index does.

Because as anyone who has tried to stretch their income to the very limit in order to buy a bigger, or even their first, house will tell you – housing costs are a very real, if not the biggest pressure, on take home pay.

But again, mention this, and you will soon find yourself missing out on dessert.

It is why whenever we get an affordability crisis stamp duty is always the first thing to be blamed.

Since Alistair Darling opened his trap and let slip axing stamp duty for a while might be a good idea, anyone and everyone has been expressing their deep belief that it was what the housing market needs.

The debate has reduced me to sitting in the corner of my office, hands clamped over ears yelling: "shut up, shut up, shut up."

Yes, Mr Darling's comments were ham-fisted. The government has ways of sounding out the nation on policy and this was not one of them.

But if those in the housing sector think suspending stamp duty will be enough to kick-start the market then they are deluded.

No-one likes stamp duty. Like inheritance tax, every budget sees a renewed call for it to be cut or abolished. Of course what they both have in common is the fact they are fundamentally liked to house price growth.

I just simply do not believe those estate agents that say Mr Darling's dithering has suddenly caused the housing market to seize up. Rubbish. It was seizing up anyway.

While anyone with a huge lump of equity will be overjoyed by the prospect, it will do nothing to solve the problems at the foot of the housing ladder.

There affordability is the key and reducing a tax that the majority outside London and the south-east still will not pay is not going to help anything.

For a while those with bigger properties will be encouraged to sell. But axing stamp duty is a solution that solves nothing in the long-term.

We will still have first-time buyers that cannot afford to buy because their income is seven or eight times less than even the most grotty bedsit. Stamp duty does not even enter the equation. Without new entrants, how will the property market survive?

The current fall in house prices is a healthy correction. Those in the housing sector have been doing very nicely out of the period of prolonged growth and those realists among you knew it would never last.

House price rises simply cannot race away ahead of wage growth indefinitely. Yes, that may not be the fault of agents and mortgage advisers but that does not mean it is an inevitability that you are not going to have to deal with.

Special measures

Nationwide has become the latest lender to join the 60 percenters. That is the previously exclusive group of banks and building societies that had special rates for those with at least 40 per cent equity.

It used to be an unattractive part of the market. But since Barclays and HSBC found there was good money to be made with rates at this end, an increasing number have joined the gang.

It is staggering that it has taken so long for lenders to reward those with bigger amounts of equity. I suppose the logic was it was better to encourage homeowners aspiring to bigger and better homes to take out bigger and longer loans.

As we have seen with the disappearance of those ghastly 100 per cent loan-to-value plus loans for first-time buyers, it has taken a credit crisis to get some kind of sense restored.

Sign of the times

Another indicator of ill things to come is that the number of landlords having their homes repossessed has doubled in a year: 1800 between January and June.

And almost double the amount as 12 months ago are in arrears. Thousands have jumped on to the buy-to-let bandwagon in the false belief that lumping all their savings in to one asset class would give them a decent retirement income. Yet the message that spreading your risk seems to have got lost in the past five years.