Andy Burnham has announced 'Your First Home,' a rebranded help-to-buy scheme offering first-time buyers in England a 20% equity loan on new-build properties, requiring just a 2.5% deposit with an initial interest-free period. The programme explicitly targets buyers without family wealth — household income caps, deposit caps, and price caps are designed to exclude those who would have bought anyway. Registration opens by end of 2026, funded by reprioritising existing government budgets. The scheme is a direct descendant of George Osborne's 2013 help-to-buy, which supported 387,000 purchases but drew heavy criticism for inflating prices and subsidising buyers who didn't need help. Labour's version attempts to fix the targeting problem: income caps, deposit caps, and price caps narrow the eligible pool. Developers pay a participation fee tied to property values. These are meaningful design improvements over Osborne's version, which applied to homes up to £600,000 with no income test. The fundamental tension remains unresolved. Demand-side subsidies in a supply-constrained market risk feeding into prices rather than expanding access. Burnham explicitly denied this, arguing the government is simultaneously boosting supply. But Angela Rayner acknowledged last weekend there is only a 'slim chance' of hitting the 1.5m homes target by the next election. If supply doesn't materialise, the equity loans become a transfer from taxpayers to developers via inflated new-build prices. Funding details are conspicuously vague. Officials said the programme would be 'funded by reprioritising existing government budgets,' but did not specify whether the money comes from existing housebuilding allocations or cuts elsewhere. If it cannibalises supply-side spending to fund demand-side stimulus, the policy is self-defeating by design. John Healey will announce specifics in the budget. The empty homes component is more structurally interesting. Reducing the eligibility period for Empty Dwelling Management Orders from two years to six months, and simplifying tribunal requirements, gives councils real teeth to bring 300,000 long-term empty dwellings back into use. This is supply-side action with low marginal cost — no new construction required, just regulatory friction removal. A government review calculated help-to-buy delivered £25bn of social value in its last financial year. That number deserves scrutiny — social value calculations are notoriously elastic, and the counterfactual (what would have happened without the scheme) is hotly contested. The honest assessment is that help-to-buy accelerated purchases that would have happened later for some buyers, enabled purchases that wouldn't have happened at all for others, and inflated prices for everyone. The political logic is clear: help-to-buy is popular, tangible, and creates identifiable beneficiaries before the next election. The economic logic is less certain. Twenty years of demand-side housing interventions in England have coincided with the worst affordability crisis in modern history. Targeting improvements help at the margin, but the core mechanism — subsidising demand in a supply-constrained market — hasn't changed.
