Tag: help to buy

No Help to Buy
No Help to Buy
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With the new government publicly renewing their ambition to see more people owning their own home, we’re reviewing the main policy tool recent governments have used to try and achieve this.

Since 2013, Help to Buy has been the flagship housing policy to make ownership a reality for households dissatisfied with the private rental sector – the only alternative given the current level of social housing supply. Through it, government has funded around £12.5bn in equity loans, resulting in around … Read more

Help to Buy is not the answer to building enough homes
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Help to Buy is this government’s biggest intervention to date in the housing market and ministers often portray it as a major part of their answer to the housing shortage. However our analysis shows that this approach cannot deliver enough homes to meet need. The only way it could is if the average price of a home in England reached an astonishing and implausible £9 million.

Let me explain.

The current – and orthodox – thinking is that the supply … Read more

Geography makes the housing crisis more complex
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Unfortunately for those of us who try to come up with neat policy solutions to our housing problems, there isn’t just one housing market. That means policies need to reflect local variation.

Ever-increasing house prices are a result of a range of complex and interconnected issues: the amount of land brought forward for development; investment and speculation on land and housing; employment and wage levels; credit availability; interest rates and consumer confidence, to name but a few. Policies that recognise … Read more