Uncovered documents have shown how the Treasury had advised Chancellor George Osborne against launching the Help to Buy scheme, saying that it will have limited effect on the construction rate in the country.

The Treasury reportedly predicted that the equity loan scheme “will have a limited impact on housing supply since most of the sales are likely to be for homes which would have been built anyway.”

The scheme was supposed to address an imbalance in the housing market; it aimed to boost construction work to bring down the prices of the houses on the market. This balance then, is very important to economists and critics of the scheme. These critics argue that the impact of the policy has been to increase buyer demand, rather than construction, now that more people don’t have to focus on amassing such a large deposit.

The Treasury said that all the purchases via the scheme, 77,000 so far, “would likely have happened anyway over time,” and so, they predicted, it won’t have helped anything.

However, even if it has only helped out sales that were going to happen anyway, it has moved those sales into the reach of those without access to large deposits, addressing the salary differences of homebuyers.

This revelation of the odds between the Treasury advice and Osborne’s defence of his flagship scheme, which was uncovered through a freedom of information request by the Independent, could make the Chancellor’s defence of the scheme more awkward on the run up to its second birthday.