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The government has made £1.74 billion from George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme, figures disclosed in Homes England’s annual report show, as housing minister Matthew Pennycook is said to be “actively reviewing” a return of the programme.
The exchequer has booked a £1.24 billion profit on the state’s share of Help to Buy equity loans that have been repaid, alongside £500 million in interest payments.
The £1.74 billion would be enough to fund a one-year extension of the prime minister’s temporary suspension of VAT on energy bills.
Help to Buy was launched in 2013 by Osborne, then the chancellor, to help buyers struggling to get on to the housing ladder. Purchasers needed a deposit of just 5 per cent, with the government providing an equity loan of up to 20 per cent of the property’s value, or 40 per cent in London. The loan is repaid in full when the home is sold, allowing the state to share in any rise in the property’s price.
A total of 387,278 loans were issued between 2013 and 2023, when the scheme formally closed, according to official Help to Buy statistics. Some 213,713, about 55 per cent, have now been repaid. Those loans originally cost the state £11.98 billion, but because repayments are linked to house prices, the exchequer received £13.22 billion, a gain of £1.24 billion.
Despite Pennycook’s review, a housing department spokesman said this weekend that “there are no current plans to introduce a new Help to Buy scheme”. Housebuilders have previously called for the revival of Help to Buy, arguing that the loss of support for first-time buyers would hit the supply of new homes.
Under Sir Keir Starmer, Labour dismissed “demand-side measures” such as reviving Help to Buy as costing the taxpayer billions and driving up house prices, focusing instead on supply-side constraints such as speeding up planning decisions. Rachel Reeves is understood to have been a staunch opponent of relaunching the scheme. She has since been replaced as chancellor by John Healey.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has pledged “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”. Housing delivery has so far fallen short of the government’s ambitions, with London building a fraction of the homes it needs in the year to March 2026.
Homes England, the quango responsible for deploying capital grants, loans and investments to increase the supply of social and affordable housing, warned in the same report that affordable homebuilding will shrink until 2027 at least because of delays to the government’s £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP).
“Completions are expected to reduce further in 2026-27,” the agency said. “The Affordable Homes Programme 2021 to 2026 is in its tapering phase, with delivery of the new SAHP not yet sufficiently scaled to offset this.”
Grant allocations under the SAHP have yet to be announced, and many larger housebuilders have opted to retrench from the market to protect their balance sheets.
“We believe it could be very challenging for housing activity to come back strongly [in the second half of 2026],” analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote last week.
The housing department spokesman said: “The government has provided significant support for people to get on the housing ladder, including through access to shared ownership schemes through the Social and Affordable Homes Programme and through changes to the mortgage rules.”
