” … a loophole in the details of the government’s flagship starter homes scheme could be exploited by prospective buy-to-let landlords – there is currently no stipulation that the buyer must live in the property. So potentially, wealthy parents could hand a child a lump sum to purchase a starter home with a 20% discount, then let the property out.
Rather than a sustainable and measured solution to the housing crisis, the government has built a house of cards: a few haphazard measures designed to temporarily boost the number of first-time buyers, without examining the foundations of the problem, but also leaving each scheme open to exploitation. In London, the capital’s specialised help-to-buy scheme doesn’t even require applicants to be first-time buyers to be eligible – they just have to be moving house.
A better solution would be one that tackled booming house prices and low building rates instead of throwing state cash at the problem and hoping it solves it, rather than simply gilding the pockets of the private sector.”
