Yesterday the government announced the extension of "Help to Buy". I did a search in London for non-shared ownership new builds to which the scheme applies. In the whole of London there was a total of 1 two-bedroom new build property on the market for less than £400,000. The next

cheapest was £410,000. This is a large contrast to older properties, which while exorbitantly expensive (and well out of my price range in my lifetime) are often £150,000 cheaper. The price of new-builds here is no reflection of either the cost of the last or the cost of building

them. "Help to Buy" is essentially a bung to developers, which hugely inflates the housing market, while allowing for the building of "luxury flats", which nobody wants and nobody can afford to buy. As in every Londoner will tell you that they would prefer a flat in an old

Victorian terrace or an ex-local authority block which has decent sized rooms and isn't made of cardboard.

Given that the government is responsible for the huge housing crisis in London they should be doing things to remedy it, like massive council home building programmes.

Instead they are continuing with this crap. On top of this, what the scheme is really designed for is part- and shared-ownership, which locks new buyers into long-term, unaffordable tenancy relationships with building freeholders, and then gives them equity in property that is

often extremely difficult to sell (although the freeholder invariably buys it back at a lower rate.)

Shared ownership properties are basically not cheaper than anything. The only advantage they give is having to have a smaller deposit, but often you monthly outgoings, which include a mortgage repayment, rent for the part you don’t own, a service charge, and government loan repay

Means that your monthly outgoings are *higher* than either traditional ownership or private renters. Like there are plenty of places in London where you can get a £150,000 part ownership and be set to pay £2000 per month for 25 years and only end up owning 25% of a crappy flat.

And then in the meantime the government has effectively created a class of mega-monopolist landlords out of developers, who don’t look like landlords because they are only renting out part-shares of properties. It is all so grim.