The perils of shared ownership

Fancy buying half a flat, paying 100 per cent of the maintenance and the cost of putting right a developer’s shoddy work?

Therein lies the great scandal at the heart of shared ownership, the government scheme which BBC Panorama exposed last week but which I others were writing about over a decade ago.

The concept sits at the heart of government efforts to increase the rate of home-ownership. Look around at the prices of London flats, compare them with average London salaries and you wonder how anyone can get on the housing ladder any more. But they do – sort of – thanks to shared ownership. Rather than fork out £400,000 for your new flat in Barking, you can ‘buy’ it by raising a mortgage for as little as £100,000. You then ‘own’ a quarter of it, and pay rent on the other three quarters – with the often elusive promise of being able to buy the rest at a later date.