Home-ownership Rates

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, since 2010, more than 2.5 million additional homes have been delivered and, since 2018, we have had four of the highest annual rates of housing supply of the last 30 years. We are building more homes, because increasing supply is fundamental to helping more people on to the housing ladder—but there is more to do. We have our new affordable homes programme, which will deliver even more affordable homes to buy and for rent to help people on to the housing ladder.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, further to my noble friend Lord Naseby’s Question, I point out that average house prices in London are now 13 times average earnings, and multiples have gone up throughout the country. As a result, many people have to rent, even though they would prefer to be home buyers, because they cannot afford the deposit. Many now pay more in rent than they would on a mortgage. Therefore, in addition to the schemes mentioned by my noble friend the Minister, do we not need some more ambitious schemes to enable more of these people to achieve their ambition of home ownership?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government completely recognise the issue that my noble friend has set out. The mortgage guarantee scheme is relatively new; it opened in April 2021 and was recently extended to June 2025. It extends the availability of 95% mortgages, which helps with that deposit issue because it reduces the amount that people need to save for their deposits. More than 39,000 households have been helped through that scheme already, and I expect many more to be helped in future. To give a sense of scale on the lifetime ISA and its predecessor—the Help to Buy ISA, our other main scheme to help with saving for deposits—I say that under the Help to Buy ISA we supported over 550,000 property completions, so these are not insignificant support schemes to help people in these areas.