Should Help to Buy be brought back? Figures show it actually made the government nearly £2bn

In the absence of a credible alternative, Help to Buy needs to be reinstated as soon as possible. Developers made money, but it appears the government did as well. Given the state of the UK housing market at present, in the absence of any sizeable rate cuts, it can help provide some impetus to the market. Burnham and his housing minister need to give this some urgent consideration. Waiting until October for the budget will be too late.

The government has just banked £1.74 billion from George Osborne's most mocked policy and is now wondering whether to bring it back. The self-awareness is breathtaking.

Help to Buy was scrapped because it was accused of inflating house prices and padding developer profits while offering first-time buyers the illusion of a helping hand. Those criticisms were not unfounded. But it also got people onto the ladder who had no other way on, and the exchequer just confirmed it turned a tidy profit, which rather undermines the case for its abolition.

The inconvenient truth is that Help to Buy without meaningful planning reform is just a house price subsidy with better branding. Inject demand without fixing supply and prices rise to meet it, developers pocket the difference and first-time buyers are back where they started, just with a larger loan. If the government brings it back and calls it a housing policy without building significantly more homes, it will deserve every criticism.

If a rebooted Help to Buy is to avoid being another multi billion pound gift to housebuilders, it actually needs some basic guardrails. First, try strict income caps so it stops acting as a middle-class welfare scheme. Next, extend it to existing homes, unless we enjoy watching buyers walk straight into new-build negative equity while developers toast record profits. We also need predictable repayment terms, not a five-year interest cliff edge that ambushes homeowners later. Finally, tie builder access to actual community housing needs, stopping volume developers from churning out high density box parks just to game government eligibility caps.

The figures from Homes England tell an inconvenient story for those who wrote it off - Help to Buy generated nearly £1.74 billion for the public purse. That's not a failed scheme. That's a scheme with a design flaw.

The problem was never the principle. Developers saw it coming and repriced accordingly. New build premiums rose, and the subsidy that was meant to help buyers ended up padding housebuilders' margins instead. Any revival needs to address that - the exact mechanism can be debated, but if the scheme comes back without fixing that dynamic, it will repeat the same mistake.

It should also be extended beyond new builds. There are renters sitting in properties right now who'd buy their home tomorrow if the deposit hurdle were lower. Limiting it to new builds just funnels money to developers. Open it up to all residential property and you genuinely move the dial on homeownership.

The popular story is that Help to Buy simply filled housebuilders' pockets. The figures tell a more awkward truth. On the loans repaid so far, the taxpayer has made around £1.74 billion, a £1.24 billion gain on its equity stake plus roughly £500 million in interest, and that is only the 55% redeemed to date. There is fair criticism in there, and I am not here to defend housebuilders: any demand subsidy risks pushing prices up, and some benefit did land with developers. But it also helped nearly 390,000 households buy and returned a profit, so calling it a giveaway is too simple. The demand-side problem it was built for has not gone away. If it returns it should be smarter: aimed tightly at first-time buyers and specific property types so it lifts buyers without inflating the market, and redesigned to remove the five-year interest cliff edge that caught the last cohort out. Bring back the principle, not the old branding.

The £1.24bn is not a windfall. It is the state's share of house price growth, handed over by more than 180,000 households as they repaid their loans. The other £500m is interest, which only starts in year six. The scheme made money because the homes went up, and the owners are the ones who paid for that.

Everyone is arguing about how people got into Help to Buy. The part that goes wrong is how they get out. The loan is repaid as 20% of what the home is worth now, 40% in London, and it is calculated on the higher of a RICS valuation or the price a real buyer has offered. So a seller can be valued above anything the market will actually pay, and still owe a share of the higher number.

Bring it back if there is nothing better on the table. But fix the exit before you fix the entry. Repay the state a share of what a buyer actually paid, not a share of what a surveyor thinks somebody should have paid.