Rishi Sunak set to announce 5% deposit mortgage scheme to help first-time buyers

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is set to announce a 5% deposit scheme to help first-time buyers get on the property ladder. 

Sunak has revealed plans to incentivise lenders to provide mortgages to first-time buyers and current homeowners with just 5% deposits on properties worth up to £600,000.

He is set to provide details on how the government will offer lenders the guarantee they require to provide mortgages covering the remaining 95% this Wednesday.

Due to the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic low-deposit mortgages have ‘virtually disappeared’ explains The Treasury.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “I want generation rent to become generation buy and these 95% mortgage guarantees help to deliver this promise.

“Young people shouldn’t feel excluded from the chance of owning their own home and now it will be easier than ever to get onto the property ladder.”

The scheme is set to be subject to the usual affordability checks and will be available from April. 

It’s based on David Cameron and George Osborne’s 2013 Help to Buy scheme that ended in June 2017. The scheme reportedly helped over 100,000 households but concerns were raised that it artificially inflated prices and housebuilder’s profits.

Shadow Housing Secretary Thangam Debbonaire raised concerns regarding the plans saying: “What young people need to get on is the secure future that comes with a decent job and genuinely affordable new houses to be built for them to make homes of, not going back to the days of sky-high mortgages.”

The Chancellor warns he is set to ‘level with people about the challenge’ and the damages of the pandemic spending.

He said: “We went big, we went early, but there is more to come and there will be more to come in the Budget. But there is a challenge and I want to level with people about the challenge.”

The government is reportedly braced for the possibility of rebellion from Tory MPs over tax rises. One member of the Northern Research Group Carlisle MP John Stevenson, suggested the Chancellor should wait until autumn before winding up support packages.

Speaking on BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme he said: “We’re not through the pandemic yet, we’ve still got a few months to go, so we want to see continuing support and we’ll probably have a much better idea of where the economy is come the autumn.

“As soon as we can get back to that levelling-up agenda which we were all elected on in 2019, we believe that in the north we have a major contribution to make to the recovery.”

However, former Chancellor Lord Ken Clarke said Mr Sunak ‘must look at’ raising such things as VAT, national insurance and income tax. 

Lord Clarke told Today: “Sensible people know in their bones that all this emergency government spending is going to have to be paid for and is going to be a burden on them.

“The manifesto you refer to was written by a couple of apparatchiks in the office halfway through the campaign.”

He said it would be ‘quite sensible’ to look at raising corporation tax with it being at ‘quite unnaturally low levels’.