First-time house buyers latest initiative – can it succeed? | Money | The Guardian

First-time house buyers latest initiative – can it succeed? | Money | The Guardian

It was more than a decade ago that ministers launched HomeBuy, a programme to help first-time buyers. Since then, such schemes have become almost a budget-day staple: the First Time Buyers Initiative, OwnHome, Social HomeBuy, Open Market HomeBuy, stamp duty holidays, FirstBuy and the Kickstart Housing Delivery plan. But despite them, the number of first-time buyers has continued to fall, from almost 600,000 in 1999 to 200,000 last year.

On Monday , as the £400m Get Britain Building programme was launched, critics asked whether it would be any different this time. David Cameron said introducing taxpayer-backed 95% mortgages would help 100,000 buyers frozen out of the market by lack of finance, while Get Britain Building will spark the construction of 16,000 new homes on moribund building sites hit by the recession