Their conclusion was that overall the scheme “not only had limited effects on affordability but may have also led to unwanted regressive distributional effects”.
Some 270,000 homes have been sold under HTB so far, an admittedly small share of the total over the past seven years. But rather than instinctively handing out more state loans for the housing market – and seeing the benefits potentially funnelled away – maybe the PM should pause and consider the evidence.
When lenders pull away from high loan-to-value mortgages, as they are presently, they’re telling us something. The housing market is being supported so far due to furlough protecting incomes, record low interest rates, and support for the market through stamp duty holidays.
Only one of that trio is likely to be in place by the middle of 2021.
With a jobs crisis likely to come to a head early next year, now is not the time to be sprinkling 95pc mortgages and potentially tipping an entire generation into negative equity. These, remember, are the young people who will be paying the bills for Covid long after the PM has left the scene.
What the next generation of homeowners currently need and deserve is the Government to follow through fully on its plans to overhaul an archaic planning system, which has hindered building and entrenched inequalities for more than 70 years.
Only supply-side reform and removing the local politics from planning can offer the fix, not yet more state subsidies distorting the market and pushing up prices.
The Government’s planning White Paper published this summer has the potential to begin to address this, by moving from a discretionary system to a rules-based one.