reallymoving comments on the Government’s housing and mortgage market review

Rob Houghton, CEO of reallymoving, comments on the Government’s housing and mortgage market review, which was announced on 9 June.

Rob says:

“We need to do much more to help people buy and afford homes in the UK, but these proposals feel rushed out following the no-confidence vote last week.

“Promises made in the past to replace social housing lost through Right to Buy have not been kept, which gives me little faith that extending Right to Buy to Housing Association tenants will deliver a genuinely incremental rise in social housing.

“This is a major concern, since we should be building hundreds of thousands of new social housing units even without the policy, and failure to do this in the past decade has led to the current situation with tenants forced to pay record rents in the private sector.

“Permitting the use of housing benefit to pay mortgages does have the potential to open home ownership up to people who could otherwise only dream of it, but there are serious questions that need to be answered.

“Firstly, about raising a deposit, which remains the biggest hurdle to home ownership, secondly, the higher borrowing rates lenders will surely charge, and thirdly, the risk that a flood of high LTV mortgages hitting the market is followed by a drop in house prices in the next couple of years.”

Kindly shared by reallymoving

Main article photo courtesy of Pixabay