To great fanfare, Prime Minister Theresa May last week announced plans to help a further 135,000 people onto the property ladder.
How? By pumping an additional £10 billion into the Government’s Help to Buy (HTB) scheme.
You might think that move would have been widely cheered but, instead, a whopping 88% of loveMONEY readers say you are opposed to it.
Admittedly this was based on just under 450 votes, so we aren’t claiming this is anything other than anecdotal, but it’s not often we see a poll skewed so strongly towards one particular answer.
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It’s simple economics
While any attempt to ease our housing crisis is obviously welcome, it’s the way the Conservatives are going about it that is raising ire.
As has been written many, many times before, our housing problem is not down to a lack of demand.
“It’s really simple: if the issue is supply and there are not enough homes being built then handing money to the struggling would-be buyers does nothing except increase the demand and support the high prices.”
We wrote that back in Spring when criticising the Help to Buy ISA, but it remains every bit as valid in relation to the Prime Minister’s latest announcement.
And, as loveMONEY writer Felicity Hannah highlighted in her brilliant opinion piece last week, “the current system is lining the homebuilder’s pockets, enriching existing homeowners by boosting their property values and doing nothing for the housing security of poorer households.”
“Extending it makes no sense and I can’t understand why the Tories can’t see that."
She also claimed that the best way to help is to build more social and affordable housing.
“If we boost supply then that will ease demand and prices will stop rising – in fact, they may even fall.
“More renters will be able to secure social housing, and enjoy the stability and security that everyone deserves.”
It’s a powerful argument – and one which many of you seem to agree with.
Helping a child buy a property? Read this first
What loveMONEY readers say
In Felicity’s piece, we not only asked readers to vote on whether you thought extending Help to Buy was a good idea but to also share your thoughts on how best to make our housing market sustainable.
We’ve picked out a few of the comments below, but to read them all simply follow this link.
@kippermanbike suggested the move could trigger another housing crash:
Call me negative, but pumping extra cash into the housing market is over inflating ridiculous house prices at the cost of the taxpayer... It will be us that have to bail the banks out again when the housing market crashes and people are left with unavoidable/unaffordable negative equity...
Elsewhere, @RHWalpole echoed Felicity’s views about boosting supply:
“What the Government needs to do is to get hundreds of thousands of new houses built ASAP. This will help more than any other scheme.
“If there are more houses on the market than prospective buyers then this will stabilise, or even reduce prices.
“Building new houses will also build the economy as it will provide work all around the country and boost production of all the things required to build houses, some of which are produced in this country.”
Finally, @SteveJM was rather more succinct, stating:
"HTB = Help The Builders."
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