A rule in the Your First Home scheme could block couples from using it who may otherwise find the scheme very helpful.
Among the rules is an income cap which bars couples with a household income of £90,000 from the scheme, which rises to £110,000 in London.
However, this rule could exclude couples who work in the public sector from the scheme despite them still struggling to be able to afford a house.
For example, The Times reported how two paramedics working in London could both be earning the reported median salary for the profession, which is £60,797.
This would take the household income up to £121,594 – well above the suggested maximum of £110,000 for the UK capital, according to analysis by Newspage.
Outside of London this could also see people like teachers and nurses excluded from the scheme as well.
The median salary for a teacher is £51,048, while for nurses it is £44,053, though these will also vary depending on someone’s experience and seniority.
The scheme is designed to help people buy their first home, but there are already concerns (Getty Stock)
However, if there was a couple made up of a nurse and a teacher on their respective professions’ median salary then they as a couple would be excluded from the scheme if they lived outside London.
Matt Coulson is the Founder at Rickmansworth-based Heron Financial, and said: “The problem is that income is the wrong thing to cap on, because it doesn’t tell you whether someone can buy.”
He added that one big problem with the previous Help to Buy scheme is that it was ‘helping people who’d have bought anyway, so some targeting is sensible’.
The scheme has not yet been fully confirmed, and it is expected to be confirmed when the budget is announced later this month in a last minute decision to postpone the announcement, with the government insisting that the concerns about the caps are ‘speculation as full details are yet to be set out’
The cap is also what distinguishes the Your First Home scheme from the previous Help to Buy scheme announced by chancellor at the time George Osbourne in 2013, and which ran until 2022.
Under the scheme people only need a deposit of 2.5 percent (Getty Stock)
Housing secretary Angela Rayner has said that the scheme will be open to first-time buyers who have a deposit of 2.5 percent on their home, with the state then providing a loan of up to 20 percent of the new build property’s value, along with an interest free period.
There will also be rules about the maximum value of the homes that people will be able to buy as well.
In the original scheme which ran between 2013 and 2021 there was a maximum property value of £600,000, which was applies across the country.
That was altered in the last two years of the scheme to be 1.5 times the value of the average first time buyer property price, varying from £186,100 in the North East to £600,000 in London.
A spokesman for the housing department said in a statement: “By reducing the size of deposits and boosting the number of high-quality new homes, Your First Home will help support more hardworking people onto the housing ladder.”
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