- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday January 25 2005 09.25 GMT
The government's move into aspirational politics included two modest schemes announced yesterday for first-time home buyers and a worrying widening of the divide between north and south. First, using publicly owned land, people on modest incomes will have the chance of buying homes for the tightly drawn cost of their construction (£60,000), with the land on which it is built owned by a government agency (say £40,000). This first-time buyers' initiative is expected to help give 80,000 people a step on to the home-ownership ladder by 2010. If, or when, they sell the home, the value of the land goes back to the agency.
Second, the current homebuy scheme, under which social tenants can buy a share of their homes rather than an outright purchase, is being extended to cover a further 300,000 families. They will not have a right to buy, but the social landlords (housing associations and local councils) will have the discretion to sell a share of the home. Social housing stock will be protected with social landlords having first refusal to buy the home back if the owner moves into the private sector. Current right-to-buy schemes are not being extended but, as forecast, the five-year plan also includes 10,000 extra social homes a year (to a total of 30,000) by 2008. So far so good, but set this against trends over the last decade. Ten years ago houses cost 3.5 times annual salaries; today they cost six times as much. No wonder the age of first-time buyers has risen from 28 in 1980 to 34 in 2003. Neither scheme is likely to see a dramatic reduction in this trend.
Despite yesterday's flurry of documents, it is impossible to measure national trends because they are no longer calculated. What the plans show is that by 2016 in the four growth areas for the wider south-east (Thames Gateway, Milton Keynes, Ashford and the Stansted-Cambridge corridor) an extra 1.1m new homes will be built, leaving the entire rest of the country with less than that. This suggests, as our regional affairs editor reported on Saturday, the north is being squeezed in order to provide cut-price homes in the south-east. Poor show.
