Move over Help to Buy – we really need Help to Sell

When I learned that the Prime Minister was thinking of launching a new Help to Buy scheme, my first response was ‘Oh no’. My second response was the same, with the caveat that we are in the last days of campaigning for local council elections, with a general election a year or so down the line, so anything that looks like a political promise now may not actually happen.

If it does though, my objections will be the same as when David Cameron and George Osborne launched the first version – except there is now more evidence of Help to Buy’s deleterious effects. ‘Help to Buy Mark I’ mostly assisted those with the means to buy anyway. For everyone else it pushed up house prices, then kept them higher than they might otherwise have been. It is hard to see how the effects of a Mark II would be significantly different.

It would be no more than a sop to those (mostly metropolitan) generation warriors who claim that they, or their children, face extortionate rents, cannot get a foot on the housing ladder, and may not own their own home until they are in their fifties and perhaps not even then.