Critics round on home ownership scheme

Thursday, 11 August 2005 12:00 AM

Key workers and first-time buyers will get a helping hand onto the property ladder under the government's flagship HomeBuy scheme, ministers said today.

The scheme enables people to buy a percentage of a home rather than the full cost, with a housing provider making up the difference, and aims to help 100,000 households to buy their own home by 2010.

However, critics have warned that the plans fail to recognise the scale of the problem of affordability right across the country, and suggested they could even make it worse.

Housing minister Baroness Andrews said that part of the money made through one prong of the scheme, Social HomeBuy, would be kept for re-investment in housing, allowing landlords to make more social lets and to prevent a reduction in social-rented provision.

But homelessness charity Shelter said today's announcement was simply confirmation of the government's "relentless drive towards subsidising home ownership at the expense of building new social rented housing".

As well Social HomeBuy, the scheme offers New Build HomeBuy, which allows people to buy a share in a newly built property; and Open Market HomeBuy, for people in London, the south-east and eastern regions to use an equity loan to buy on the open market.

But Shelter director of housing Adam Sampson said the open market scheme threatened to exacerbate affordability problems, particularly in areas that, with the highest house prices, are at the highest risk.

"Further fuelling the demand for home ownership by giving equity loans to first time buyers will only prevent the market regaining its natural equilibrium," he said.

"We must prioritise the needs of those who suffer in the worst and most insecure housing over the aspirations of those who want to own their own home."

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has also criticised the scheme, but by contrast argues that it must be expanded further to have any significant effect.

Senior parliamentary and policy spokesman Neil Johnson said the government's efforts in this and in increasing house building are "nowhere near what is required to have any significant effect on affordability".

"RICS believe that to have any real effect, such schemes must be drastically expanded," he said, adding that the definition of key workers eligible for the scheme must be widened.

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