“Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up,” George Osborne is said to have quipped at a Cabinet meeting earlier this year. The Chancellor’s joke misfired; some Cabinet colleagues felt that raising the prospect of another housing bubble was no laughing matter. This week David Cameron launched phase two of the Help to Buy scheme, designed to help people who cannot raise a big deposit to get on or move up the housing ladder with 95 per cent mortgages backed by government guarantee. Officially, the...
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