Once again, people have spoken out against the Help to Buy scheme, this time calling it a risk to tax payers and saying there are too many unanswered questions.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has stated that the scheme could create a £10bn portfolio that will create a “heavy administrative burden” for decades to come.
The PAC admitted that the scheme had been introduced smoothly and had helped 13,000 homebuyers to buy a home they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford in the first nine months of the scheme running, but they said the scheme violated treasury guidelines because alternative options were not considered before the scheme was instigated.
Margaret Hodge, MP with the Labour Party, spoke on Sky News saying that there were too many unanswered questions to know for certain whether Help to Buy was a danger to the economy or not.
“We don’t know who is right about whether this is supporting a housing bubble… no evaluation before you start, no evaluation during it, no assessment of how this interacts with other schemes means we simply don’t know” she said.
Housing minister Kris Hopkins rejected Hodge’s claims and said that the plan supported the economy. To counter this, Labour’s Emma Reynolds pointed out that the rate of house building is at the lowest peace-time level since the 1920’s.
With all these arguments and statistics being thrown to and fro, Hodge seems to have got one thing right, that nobody knows anything for certain.
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