Is 2010 a good time to buy a house?

Well, with house price values slowing down you would think there's never been a better time to buy. So, what is stopping people buying? The biggest obstacle is the availability of adquate funds i.e. affordable sizable mortgages. First time buyers are the lifeblood of any housing market, but getting onto the property ladder for them is proving too difficult. Lenders are now being ultra-cautious after years of mortgage give-aways. Gone are the days when Banks, Building Societies and other financial institutions would bombard you with unlimited offers. Everyday you would receive advertisements offering fix-rate mortgages, 100% loans, 4 to 6 times your annual salary, that is until the US market blew its financial gasket and the repercussions were felt worldwide. Toxic debt suddenly became a problem for all governments. Perhaps this finally made everyone come to their senses and made people think that the boom in property prices were more harmful than good. The downside to this is of course is a stagnation of the sale of properties. Yes, houses are still being bought, but not at the levels needed to stimulate the market. We are experiencing the difficulty first hand of our daughter trying to get onto the property ladder. She needs to be able to produce a minimum deposit of between £7k to £10k to even get started. That takes a great deal of time and effort to achieve. Even then her salary has to be around the £25k per annum mark to be able to meet her monthly repayments. Unfortunately, she meets neither criteria at the present time. So our idea is to try and sell our current property enabling us to downsize and  so hopefully be able to release some funding for her. But like a lot of sellers, we cannot move forward until a buyer is found and so the process slows even further. I think a lot will hinge on who forms the next government and what their policies will be and what further impact it will have on the housing market. Will the Bank of England keep interests low, because fear of any increase will further slow down the housing market? Stamp duty tax is another thing that stunts house sales going forward and which is hated by everyone except the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nobody wants to pay over inflated prices for property, which has happened in the past, what we want is sensible pricing being achieved, which should help things to get moving. People should also take more responsibility about how much they can realistically afford to borrow. That way confidence should slowly return and  repossessions be reduced. Have you any ideas of what the government can do to improve the housing market, if anything?