The Government’s evaluation estimates that Help to Buy generated additional housing supply equivalent to around 15% of new-build homes in England during the scheme. We examine what its findings tell us about effective demand, development viability and housing delivery.
The Government’s newly published evaluation of the Help to Buy scheme reinforces a point that remains highly relevant to the development market: housing delivery depends on effective buyer demand, development viability and market confidence, as well as land supply and planning.
For landowners, developers, housebuilders and promoters, the findings provide encouraging evidence of how buyer demand can support development confidence and housing supply. They also offer timely lessons for the future direction of housing policy.
What did the Help to Buy evaluation find?
The Government’s newly published evaluation looked back at the Help to Buy equity loan scheme which ran from 2013 to 2023. The scheme provided an equity loan worth up to 20% of a new build property’s value, rising to 40% in London, to help purchasers buy with a 5% deposit. Over 387,000 properties were bought through the scheme, supported by £24.7 billion of equity loans.
The report assessed the scheme’s effect on home ownership, housing supply, developer performance, house prices, customer experience and value for money. Its overall conclusion was that Help to Buy increased access to home ownership, had a positive effect on housing supply across England and represented very high value for money, with an estimated net present social value of £25.1 billion in 2024 to 2025 prices.
Did Help to Buy increase housing supply?
Yes, the evaluation’s central conclusion is that it did. The econometric analysis suggests Help to Buy generated additional housing supply equivalent to around 15% of new-build homes in England over the life of the scheme, with the strongest effect in the early years when the market was still recovering from the financial crisis.
The important point is how that increase happened. Greater access to finance increased first-time buyer demand, improved confidence among developers and supported increased housebuilding. For consented sites, that is the commercial lesson. Planning permission alone does not create build-out if sales absorption and viability are weak.
What does the evaluation tell us about housing demand?
The report’s wider lesson is that effective demand matters as much as headline demand. Help to Buy reduced the deposit barrier for eligible purchasers and supported more first-time buyer mortgage sales. In the customer survey, 46% of users said they could not have bought a home without the scheme, while 54% said they could have bought without it.
That split matters because it shows the scheme was partly enabling access to home ownership that would not otherwise have happened, and partly changing what and where people bought. The evaluation also found many purchasers used the scheme to buy larger homes or to buy sooner than they otherwise could have done, which still affected new build sales rates.
The impact was not uniform. In less affordable and higher value markets, additional finance did less to increase home ownership and may have contributed to house price inflation. The evaluation notes an estimated house price effect of around 1% more for a Help to Buy home than for a similar new build not bought through the scheme, and around 2% overall near the England and Wales border.
Piers Beeton, Director of Development at Newton LDP said, "It's great to see this evaluation published, and it feels very timely with the autumn budget looming. In essence, it validates what many of us in the industry have thought since the scheme was stopped in 2023 - demand-side support works.
"The evaluation estimates that around 15% of new builds during the scheme were built as a result of Help to Buy. It also puts the scheme’s social value at £25.1 billion and shows that it helped thousands of first-time buyers onto the housing ladder who otherwise would not have been able to buy.
"A reintroduction of government support for buyers feels essential if the Government is to get anywhere close to the 1.5 million homes target it has set itself."