So much for an asset that only ever goes up. Last year, nearly one in five people selling a flat in England and Wales got less than they paid for it. Across much of the country, flat prices remain below their pre-pandemic levels. The Help to Buy tricked people into thinking they had made a smart investment when, in fact, they were handed a depreciating liability.
And here is the cruelty of it: while the state pumped up demand, it throttled supply. Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million homes by 2029 needs 300,000 a year; it is running at under a quarter of that. There’s no mystery to this failure. The cost of building a single home has risen by over £70,000 since 2020. Forty per cent of it from the Government’s own taxes and rules: the Building Safety Levy, the Future Homes Standard, and biodiversity net gain. It is simple enough to understand. If you make something expensive to produce, people will stop producing it. Approvals are now at their weakest since 2012.
So both ends of the bargain failed at once, on the same person. The home they borrowed to buy became a liability they cannot sell; the home that might have replaced it was never built. The state inflated the bubble with one hand and salted the ground with the other, then handed the bill to a thirty-something in a Croydon one-bed who’d done exactly as told.
In hindsight, everyone is an expert, but for those who bought between 2013 and 2023, the sad truth is that they bought the dream of owning a property, invested, forgot about it and were made worse off.
