Help to Buy ending

The end of Help to Buy is to be welcomed, because it was never about helping first-time buyers. It was about propping up house prices to unaffordable levels and helping house builders sell homes by making it easier for first-time buyers to pay top dollar for them. A more appropriate name for the scheme is Help to Sell. The alternative to Help to Buy is lower house prices. That's the only alternative first-time buyers have ever truly needed, and one which they are finally about to get.

It is a great shame that Help to buy has not been extended. It has genuinely helped so many to get onto the housing ladder. And the alternatives coming down the pipes are woefully inadequate. Firstly you have the deposit unlock scheme, letting you get a mortgage on a new build property with a 5% deposit. Which is basically useless as some lenders were offering a 5% deposit on new build properties anyway. Then you have the First Homes Scheme which Boris proclaimed as the "thank you to key workers" during the pandemic, and now is almost nowhere to be found. The only remaining viable alternative is the shared ownership scheme, which helps first time buyers onto the ladder, but there is nowhere near enough of it, with 8-10 people applying for each shared ownership property.

It is imperative, for the sake of those buyers that miss out on the current help to buy scheme and the hundreds of thousands more looking to buy their first home in the near future, that the scheme is extended or replaced with something similar or better. The alternative in my opinion is an unknown, high rate, economically convulsive dystopian future where there are very few if any alternative assistance schemes for first time buyers at anywhere near the level of direct financial support provided by help to buy. Couple that with some mortgage rates being literally twice as high as they were a few months ago, having a stab at beating the deadline sounds a lot more appealing to me. For first time buyers that are not registered on the scheme already or don’t have a mortgage offer already, it is highly likely that they have missed the boat for now. Without first time buyers the housing market will seize up as the large pool of potential homeowners isn’t there to inject liquidity into the bottom layer of the property pyramid. Without that liquidity sales transactions will decrease sharply which impacts the construction industry, property developers, construction professional services, tradespeople, real estate agents and many more secondary and tertiary stakeholders in the primary real estate and related industries. Furthermore, with mortgage rates likely to hover around the mark they are at or increase slightly over time, an enforced shift may take us from a nation of home owners to a nation of home renters. Many young people and first-time buyers will have no choice, particularly key workers such as teachers, nurses, carers and the emergency services who simply will not be able to afford to buy a home in the area that they live and work in. As we lurch towards 2023 with a 65% increases decade on decade of families living in temporary accommodation, currently at 96,060 families, which doesn’t include the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 rough sleepers in the UK, the answer to the housing crisis is clear. We must build more new homes for ownership, more new homes for rent and more Council owned affordable, sustainable homes to reduce the number of homeless families and people on their own in temporary accommodation and sleeping rough across the UK. To do this we must have Government schemes that supports and assist young people, first time buyers, key workers, low-income families and the elderly to buy and rent warm, safe homes. Without help to buy or something very similar we are condemning the next generation to very few opportunities to buy their own home with the added unwanted bonus of sky-high costs just to rent their own home. We are sleepwalking towards a ‘no help’ to buy scheme whilst we change housing ministers like most people change their underpants and as usual the only ones that will suffer are the ones that need help the most.