Help Buyers to get Britain Building
Tim Foreman, Managing Director of Land and New Homes, LRG, comments:
It is clear that Labour cannot meet its housing ambitions just through planning reform. It is imperative that Andy Burnham uses time at the upcoming Labour Party Conference to back a targeted successor to Help to Buy – one that restores demand without repeating the shortcomings of the original scheme.
Labour’s conference needs to confront the uncomfortable fact that approving more homes will not ensure that they are built. What we are seeing in today’s market is that developers will start work on sites only when they have reasonable confidence that the completed homes will sell. At present that confidence is being weakened by a first-time buyer market constrained by high deposit requirements, mortgage affordability and the absence of meaningful government support.
The latest figures illustrate the size of the challenge. MHCLG estimates that 199,500 net additional homes were delivered in England in 2025/26. New-build starts totalled 130,170 in the year to March 2026 – an improvement on the previous year but still far short of the sustained level required to deliver 1.5 million homes during this Parliament.
Planning reform is necessary, but planning permissions are not purchasers. First-time buyers are especially important because they provide demand at the beginning of both the sales chain and the development process. They help developers establish early sales rates, give funders confidence and generate the cashflow needed to begin subsequent phases. If this part of the market remains weak, additional permissions will increasingly become a larger pipeline of unbuilt homes.
The evidence for Help to Buy
The case for intervention has been strengthened considerably this week with the government’s own evaluation of Help to Buy. More than 387,000 properties were purchased through the scheme between 2013 and 2023, including 328,000 by first-time buyers. The evaluation found that 46% of customers could not have bought without it and estimated that the scheme increased new housing supply by around 15% across England.
Most strikingly, it concluded that Help to Buy represented ‘very high value for money’, generating an estimated net present social value of £25.1 billion. It also found that the scheme increased confidence among developers, allowing them to build more quickly and open more sites.
Avoiding an exact copy of Help to Buy
That does not mean the original model should simply be reinstated. The evaluation also found that 54% of customers might have bought without the scheme and that Help to Buy probably raised prices modestly, particularly in already expensive areas. Those are reasons to improve the policy, not to reject demand-side support altogether.
A modern Help to Buy scheme should be limited to first-time buyers purchasing new homes, with regional price caps, appropriate income limits and support proportionate to local affordability. It should concentrate public money on households that can sustain a mortgage but cannot bridge the deposit or affordability gap without assistance.
Clearer repayment terms and a simpler redemption process would address some of the original scheme’s weaknesses. The Government could also require participating developers to contribute towards its cost, ensuring that the industry shares both the benefit and the financial responsibility.
This should sit alongside the permanent mortgage guarantee scheme, sensible mortgage regulation and stronger support for shared ownership. But those policies do not remove the case for targeted equity assistance. A 95% mortgage helps with the deposit, but it does not necessarily make monthly payments affordable. An equity loan reduces both the deposit requirement and the initial mortgage burden.
Supply policy needs buyers
The government is investing in affordable housing and reforming planning, both of which are welcome. Yet housing policy has become unbalanced. It concentrates heavily on land, permissions and construction while giving insufficient attention to who will purchase the homes.
Labour’s conference should therefore treat first-time buyer support as part of its housebuilding programme, not as a separate consumer benefit. A carefully targeted successor to Help to Buy would widen access to ownership, restore confidence at the sales end of the market and give developers a commercial reason to convert more permissions into starts.
If the Government is to at least try to deliver 1.5 million homes this Parliament, it must help create the market that will buy those homes.
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