Greater demand without any significant measures to address squeezed supply will make the dream of home ownership for many people less achievable, not more, which is really quite the own goal for the Conservatives.
Perhaps the looming election overshadows all else in Westminster, and Rishi Sunak believes there are votes to be had in encouraging more borrowing by a generation already up to its eyeballs in student debt. It seems improbable.
Yet you can see why they’re targeting aspiring home-owners: a recent YouGov poll showed just one voter in 10 under 50 plans to vote Conservative – a shockingly and historically low proportion. You can also imagine this going down well with young voters who feel like they’re destined to be stuck in rented accommodation for the rest of their lives.
There will be a sugar-rush as thousands clamour to snap up a mortgage that allows you to buy a £300,000 house with a deposit of just £3,000, and for that first stampede of people it will seem like a god-send.
The gap between prices and household incomes has become a chasm, shutting millions of families out of the property market.
It now takes five years for someone on the average wage, squirrelling away 15pc of their wages, to raise a typical 10pc deposit. Home ownership among the 25- to 34-year-old age bracket has nosedived, as the end of Help to Buy coupled with soaring mortgage rates has pushed down the number of first-time buyers to its lowest level in a decade.
But as critics have warned, a 1pc deposit mortgage would be nothing more than a short-term fix. Perhaps it would not even meet that low bar. It’s a potentially dangerous stunt that risks fanning the flames of yet another unsustainable boom.
Perhaps most worryingly, tricks like this demonstrate that ministers not only don’t understand what’s driving the problem, they don’t recognise their part in it either.
