Whether by accident or design Gordon Brown and his equally beleaguered Chancellor gave a handy fillip to their compatriots yesterday. By raising the threshold for stamp duty on house purchases to £175,000 for the coming year, at a stroke they removed nine-tenths of first-time buyers in Scotland from its reach, a far higher proportion than in England. That is because at £155,691, the average house price north of the Border is considerably lower. By the same token, Scots also stand to benefit disproportionately from the increase to £175,000 in the capital limit allowed for Income Support for mortgage interest payments when a homeowner becomes unemployed. And it will be paid after 13 weeks of unemployment, a much-needed change. The current 39 weeks is widely considered to kick in too late to be helpful.

Devolution renders most of the rest of yesterday's package to kick-start the housing market irrelevant in Scotland. By and large, it equates to measures already announced by First Minister Alex Salmond. There is a shared equity scheme to help first-time buyers that resembles the Low Cost Initiative already operating in 10 Scottish council areas, except that the English scheme focuses on newbuild properties, a feature Scottish developers will envy.

The mortgage rescue scheme for those facing repossession is also roughly as broad as the Scottish version is long, with funds going to social landlords to buy and rent back homes to their current owners. Similarly on affordable homes, money from future budgets is being brought forward to enable providers to built more units this year and next. Will it work? John Major's attempt to rescue the housing market by cutting Stamp Duty in the early 1990s failed but houseprices were falling faster and repossessions were at double their present level. Messrs Brown and Darling argue that as part of a package of measures, the change in the duty stands a better chance of working this time around.

It will certainly end the paralysis that has afflicted the first-time buyer market since Mr Darling's famous non-denial of the rumoured change. A little movement on this front may encourage others to return to the market. And it enables the Government to avoid the accusation that it fiddled while Rome burned.

However, the recent disaster to have overwhelmed Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, the two privatised giants that previously underpinned the American mortgage market, demonstrates the desperate lack of liquidity in the world's financial markets. Loaded with dodgy debt, banks have essentially stopped lending to each other, and until they start again, individuals looking to mortgage or remortgage a property will be doing a lot of whistling. Therefore, much hangs on the report due shortly from Sir James Crosby on how to breathe new life back into the British mortgage market. Smart money is on a scheme to enable banks and building societies to swap some of their mortgages for government-backed securities. That, rather than yesterday's announcement, will determine how quickly the housing market can recover.

In the longer term, the only way to unshackle British economic confidence from a dangerous reliance on house prices is to produce a better balance between home ownership and renting. And if tougher times are coming, we need to ensure that everyone has a decent home. On both counts, that implies we should be spending considerably more than we are on affordable housing.