Tuesday 25 June 2013

"Help to buy is a real achievement...

...it has managed to unite every single economist I know in condemnation. It is going to push up demand while achieving virtually nothing in supply."

Jonathan Portes addresses an unreceptive audience

Peter Schofield, director general for the Neighbourhoods Group at the Communities Local Government department, defended the scheme.

He said: ‘The help to buy is all about new supply. The scheme has attracted so far 4,300 reservations in the first two months and private developers will be trying to build 10 per cent more each year to meet the growth in demand.’

3 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Ah... they' be TRYING to increase supply by 10,000 homes a year, well that will make a massive dent in all that "pent up demand" won't it?

Bob E said...

We surely mustn't knock that "10% ambition" - even if we have concerns that with HTB and the like in place they'll not be over-bothered about managing to build the "baseline" 100,000 - because as a "year on year" ambition that means come oh around about 2042 they'll be throwing up 1.5 million new homes every year.

Mark Wadsworth said...

... or they might just revise the baseline down to 90,000 and then count it as an increase when they build 100,000 after all, applying the same rules as for chocolate rations.