Is Britain heading for a housing boom?

House prices look set to be heading higher, thanks to government intervention. But is that what Britain really needs? Emily Hohler reports.

At the last Budget, chancellor George Osborne "reached for the home-ownership Viagra" when he announced measures to encourage people onto the housing ladder, says Kamal Ahmed in The Daily Telegraph.

Under the first phase of the Help to Buy scheme, purchasers of new-build homes can put down a deposit of just 5%, with the government providing interest-free loans of 20%. Under the second, more controversial phase launching in January, taxpayer-backed loans will be available to buyers of properties worth up to £600,000. With the Bank of England's (BoE) Funding for Lending scheme already cutting mortgage costs, house prices are now rising at "quite a clip".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.