Home Ownership: Government Support

14. What steps the Government are taking to support home ownership.

We are committed to creating a fair and just housing system that works for everyone. We have already cut stamp duty land tax, as the threshold at which it becomes due has doubled to £250,000, and we are expanding first-time buyers’ relief. We also have a range of programmes in place to help people into home ownership. Since spring 2010, more than 800,000 households have been helped to purchase a home through Help to Buy.

My right hon. Friend will know that 836 families in Darlington have benefited from Help to Buy in the past year, and 715 of them were first-time buyers. Given the success of the scheme what consideration has he given to extending it beyond March 2023?

I gladly pay tribute to Help to Buy, which has been a huge success, helping over 361,000 households to buy a new build from its launch in spring 2013 until the end of March this year. However, it was never designed to be a permanent intervention in the housing market. The closure at the end of March 2023 has been planned and publicised since the 2018 Budget, which has allowed the market to respond by introducing several products that provide similar levels of support to Help to Buy for first-time buyers. The Government have introduced various schemes as well, including First Homes, the mortgage guarantee scheme and shared ownership.

As well as having to cope with the cost of remortgaging, thousands of people who thought they had bought a safe and secure home are still living with unsafe cladding and other fire-safety defects. What is the Secretary of State’s current assessment of the total number of properties in England that have yet to be made safe?

My commitment to making sure that we follow through on the issue of remediating unsafe buildings is total. There are 24 buildings over 18 metres that have yet to be remediated in the way that the right hon. Gentleman sets out.[Official Report, 19 October 2022, Vol. 720, c. 4MC.] My priority—I will meet developers shortly—is to ensure that they sign the contract, which they committed to do in the summer, thanks to the hard work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), and to make sure that they fulfil their responsibilities. We are also taking action against those freeholders who have declined to remediate the buildings that they are committed to look after. We have served a pre-action notice on the owners of Vista tower in Stevenage with precisely the intention of making sure that they honour their obligations.

Home ownership is absolutely key to social mobility, but as historically low interest rates come to an end, that becomes more difficult for future generations and existing homeowners. Will the Secretary of State commit to work with Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert to make sure that as we collectively navigate the changing landscape we communicate the most helpful advice to help people to deal with the changes?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need to communicate clearly with the public about all the support and options that are available. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor is coming to the House later this afternoon precisely to give the kind of calm, clear messaging that we want so that we can reassure investors and the markets that there is a clear way forward on this vital question so that we can get interest rates as low as possible

One of the things that has helped my local authority to become the best in the south-west in providing affordable housing to buy and to rent is the power to require private developers to provide a proportion of housing that is affordable. Will the Secretary of State reassure me that worrying reports that the Government are considering raising the threshold for that requirement are not true?

We are looking at all the options that are open to us to try to accelerate house building across the country. We want to make sure that the right incentives are in place for developers to build—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) will let me answer the question, rather than shout at me. The reality is that we want to look at all those options. We have consulted on that particular option before, and we have decided not to do it. It is an issue that we keep under review, but the reasons that applied in our decision not to proceed then are very powerful.