Could Burnham bring back Help to Buy? Experts on the Your First Home scheme

This will undoubtedly help some first-time buyers. A smaller deposit and government equity loan could make the difference for someone who can afford the mortgage but simply cannot save a large enough deposit.

But a smaller deposit does not solve mortgage affordability. If rates continue to rise, the monthly payment will still decide whether someone can actually buy. There is little point helping someone through the deposit door if the mortgage does not stack up.

The bigger concern is that Help to Buy risks stimulating demand without fixing the wider housing market. Give buyers more purchasing power without increasing supply and some of that benefit can simply disappear into higher prices.

It is great to help first-time buyers, but this fails to fix the wider housing market issues. Stamp duty is still bunging up the market by discouraging people from moving, downsizing or trading up. Help to Buy tackles one problem, but leaves the bigger problem untouched.

Help to Buy did help people who may otherwise have struggled to purchase, but the latest government evaluation also found that more than half of participants were not ‘additional’, suggesting they could have bought a suitable home without the scheme. If it returns, better targeting should therefore be a priority.

Support should be focused on buyers for whom the deposit or affordability gap is genuinely preventing home ownership, rather than subsidising purchases that would probably have happened anyway. Higher mortgage rates also mean an equity scheme cannot solve monthly affordability on its own, and increasing buying power without increasing housing supply risks feeding through into prices.

This is a lifeline for housebuilders dressed up as help for first-time buyers. It's new build only, so the taxpayer is once again backing the one part of the market where buyers routinely pay a premium, and where developers build more or less depending on what incentives are on the table. Help to Buy got over 328,000 first-time buyers onto the ladder, but it also helped push Persimmon's profits past £1bn a year, and some owners later found they couldn't sell for what they paid. Charging developers a fee is progress, but it won't stop a 20% loan being baked into the asking price. The timing is awkward too. Best five-year fixes have gone from 3.75% in March to around 4.6%, with a rate rise widely expected in November. Even with a 20% loan and a 2.5% deposit, buyers still need a 77.5% mortgage at today's rates, and the interest-free spell won't last. Clever politics, lazy economics. If Burnham wants to get Britain moving, scrap stamp duty for first-time buyers and downsizers.

Bringing it back is far from desperate, because the evidence on the original is strong. The government's own evaluation rated it very high value for money, the taxpayer actually made money as the equity loans were repaid, and it lifted new-build supply by around 15%. That undercuts the lazy 'it was just a builder giveaway' line. The fair criticism is more specific. Around half of buyers could have bought without it, and it nudged prices up a little in areas that were already expensive. So a relaunch has to learn from that: aim it at the people who genuinely can't get there, keep it away from the hottest markets, and build it around the monthly payment. That last point matters most now. With rates where they are, the payment is what stops people buying, so a scheme aimed at the payment could do more today than it did a decade ago. Get the design right and it helps get Britain moving. Copy it blindly and it won't. And give it a new name.

For smaller housebuilders, the test is whether a revived Help to Buy scheme helps buyers complete purchases and releases capital for the next development. We’ve reported on developers whose money is tied up in completed but unsold homes, so stronger demand could make a practical difference. But lenders cannot build a proposed scheme into their sales forecasts until they know which buyers and properties qualify, how the assistance works and when it becomes available. Higher mortgage rates will still determine what buyers can afford. The detail matters more than the name.

Help to Buy gets called heavy-handed intervention by some and tinkering at the edges by others, but the fact that governments keep coming back to it tells you they believe it works. When they were active we would speak to clients every week who are using schemes like this to get on the ladder and for many it made a clear difference.

The big question is whether it's new build only again, as reported. Linking it only to new homes risks lining developers' pockets, pushing up prices and creating demand in places that may struggle to hold a second-hand market, especially where estates go up without the schools, transport and services that make a real community. If the government wants to get Britain moving, it should let buyers use it on any home, including older properties that need doing up, because that's where most of our housing already is.

Burnham the tinkerer at it again, fiddling with policy edges instead of confronting the real problem. His Help to Buy relaunch, a 20% government equity loan against a 2.5% deposit, won't touch the sides of what's wrong with the property market: not enough homes are being built. With rates still elevated, lenders keep strict income multipliers in place, leaving a 75% mortgage gap most modest earners can't bridge, and the interest eventually due on that equity loan stores up refinancing risk. Politically, this will be sold at Labour conference as clever intervention. It isn't, it's desperation, papering over sluggish planning reform by subsidising demand. Without a real supply boost, the scheme won't fix affordability. It'll just inflate new-build prices.