The Intermediary – August 2026 - Flipbook - Page 9
RESIDENTIAL
Opinion
The case for Help
to Buy just got
£2bn stronger
A
ndy Burnham’s
pledge to deliver
the biggest council
housebuilding
programme in
decades is welcome –
but it is only half a housing strategy.
If the Government wants housing to
drive economic growth, it also needs
more people buying homes. And the
strongest, fastest lever available is a
successor to Help to Buy.
Homes England’s latest annual
report shows the original scheme
has now returned almost £2bn to
the Exchequer – a £1.24bn profit on
repaid equity loans, plus £500m in
interest. The loans issued between
2013 and 2023 cost the state £11.98bn;
the 55% repaid so far have already
brought back £13.22bn. Far from being
the fiscal drain its critics alleged,
Help to Buy has proved to be an
investment that pays the taxpayer back
with a return.
That distinction is important in a
tight fiscal environment. An equity
loan sits on the national balance
sheet as an asset, appreciating
alongside the homes it helps to
buy. The Government’s preferred
alternative, the Mortgage Guarantee
Scheme, sits there as a contingent
liability – a cost-in-waiting with no
upside – and supports only around
10,000 purchases a year. One approach
creates an asset; the other creates a
liability. The Treasury does not oen
get offered growth policies that pay for
themselves.
And the growth effects are
substantial. Every first-time buyer
(FTB) sets off activity far beyond
the transaction itself – for builders,
lenders, advisers, surveyors,
conveyancers, removal firms and
retailers. Recent modelling by
Public First for Yorkshire Building
Society estimates that each home
sale generates £27,000 in gross value
added (GVA) to the economy, rising to
around £66,000 once housing chains
are taken into account. The same
research found that a targeted Help
to Buy-style scheme would have the
largest impact of any intervention
tested: enabling around 370,000
additional first-time buyers to afford
a property, supporting some 55,000
extra purchases and 20,100 additional
new homes a year, and generating
around £9.4bn in annual GVA and
£2.8bn in fiscal revenue.
A new era
It is fair to ask whether regulatory
reform alone might do the job. The
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
and the Financial Policy Commiee
have made a genuine start: the loanto-income (LTI) flow limit has been
eased, stress-testing expectations
have been clarified, and lenders have
responded energetically – soening
affordability calculations, lending at
higher income multiples where it is
responsible to do so, and innovating
with low- and no-deposit products
such as £5,000-deposit mortgages.
But at today’s house prices, in large
parts of the country, they are simply
not enough. Regulation can widen
access to borrowing, but it cannot
conjure a deposit. Analysis for the
Yorkshire Building Society report
found that just 11% of renters aged
20 to 44 are currently in a financial
position to buy a home in England,
falling to 5% in London.
Many of these households have
spent years proving they can sustain
substantial monthly housing costs
through rising private rents. What
blocks them is the upfront hurdle, and
that is precisely the problem an equity
loan solves.
KATE DAVIES
is executive director at
Intermediary Mortgage
Lenders Association
The scale of untapped demand
is considerable. IMLA’s research
identifies a cumulative shortfall of
around 3.5 million households who,
based on past trends, would have been
expected to buy since the financial
crisis but have not.
Unlocking even a fraction of that
demand would give housebuilders
the confidence to open new sites.
Private developers will only invest
where they believe buyers will be
waiting. With Homes England
warning that affordable completions
will fall further before the Social and
Affordable Homes Programme scales
up, supporting demand is not a rival to
the Government’s supply ambitions,
it is the mechanism that makes
them deliverable.
Help to Buy’s delivery infrastructure
already exists: lenders understand it,
advisers know how to guide buyers
through it and developers are familiar
with it. A successor could be live
quickly, and it could be beer – more
tightly targeted at FTBs, capped on
property values, applied across newbuild and existing homes, and focused
where the returns are greatest.
The housing minister is reported to
be actively reviewing the option. He
should conclude that review boldly.
Britain needs more homes to rent, and
the council housebuilding programme
will provide them. But it also needs
more people to own, and a reformed
Help to Buy is the rare policy that
widens access to homeownership,
accelerates housebuilding, stimulates
growth across the wider economy and
hands the Exchequer a profit. The
evidence is now in - the Government
should act on it. ●
August 2026 | The Intermediary
7
