The verdict is in: George Osborne’s help-to-buy scheme has been an utter disaster

‘Instead of paying for lasting brick-and-mortar council homes, the taxpayer subsidises private landlords through housing benefit, costing £22bn a year.’ Photograph: Patricia Phillips/Alamy

A rogue prime minister on the verge of defenestration drives out news of almost anything else. But housing usually languishes in the forgotten in-tray anyway. It sits low in voters’ and government concerns: the last 17 housing ministers remained in post, on average, for barely more than a year. Housing stories fill news pages, but only if they provide an opportunity to gloat over escalating property prices.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a shocking report on a Conservative flagship housing policy fell below the news radar. The Lords-built environment committee has revealed that all of the £29bn spent on the help-to-buy scheme has been wasted. The scheme gives subsidies for homeownership, but all they do is “inflate prices by more than their subsidy value”. They “do not provide good value for money”, which would be “better spent on increasing housing supply.”