The (London) Observer, Apr 27: If homeowners pay a percentage of the value of their land each year, it could help to prevent the next bubble inflating.

Help to Buy risks helping to create another housing bubble

In his ’emergency’ budget in 2010, George Osborne pledged to create a less debt-fuelled economy. Where is that promise now?

By Heather Stewart
Sat 27 Apr 2013

Excerpt:

In Osborne’s first, “emergency”, budget in 2010, he carefully laid out his intention of building a safer, more stable economy, less reliant on debt-fuelled spending. Yet three years on, scarred by the failure of the pound’s 20% depreciation to spark an industrial renaissance, he appears to be banking on the two-speed doctrine to lift him clear of trouble.

Osborne has insisted that Help to Buy is not aimed at pushing up prices. But encouraging first-time buyers to take out mortgages with high loan-to-value ratios – on properties whose value may be unsustainable even at current levels, let alone after another market bounce – is hardly a recipe for a fairer or more stable economy.

The Treasury claims to hope the policy will stimulate housebuilding, helping to ease the chronic shortage of homes that has driven up prices; but as the Treasury select committee rightly pointed out in its report on the budget, if the government really wanted to kickstart building, it should act to do so directly. That might mean taking advantage of record low gilt yields to invest in council housing, for example. But as Pete Jefferys of Shelter put it in a blog last week, Help to Buy is a “Thatcher-style home ownership revolution, not a Macmillan-style housebuilding boom”.