They own land! Give them money!

From The Telegraph:

The Chancellor said the scheme will be available to everyone who wants to buy a home, old or new, under the Help to Buy scheme from 2014.

He will help people get on or move up the property ladder by offering Government "mortgage guarantees" worth £130 billion in total. This will mean people can afford bigger mortgages with a small deposit.

Many people have struggled to save up enough since banks scrapped their best mortgage lending deals after the financial crisis.

In a separate part of the initiative, the Government will offer interest-free loans for five years if people want to buy new-build homes. The loans will be worth up to 20 per cent of the value of a newly-built homes, with the buyer contributing 5 per cent as a deposit.

I suppose the only good news is that the take-up of these schemes is very low. Ed Miliband pointed out that only 1,500 households had bought a house under the previous wizard wheeze (NewBuy or whatever it was called).

My problems with Not Red Ed are threefold:

1. His lot invented just as many of these stupid schemes to prop up land prices and banks, and the take-up was just as low.

2. He seemed to think that a low take-up was A Bad Thing. It's not, it's A Very Good Thing Indeed, the ideal take-up would be precisely zero.

3. He confused me at first by saying "how thing", which I assumed was groovy txt speak for "How's things?". After a few sentences I realised he was trying to say "housing".