Help to Buy schemes mostly helped high earners, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned the government, which is considering reviving such a programme.
Help to Buy offered equity loans to first-time buyers of up to 20% of the sale value, and ran from 2013 to 2023.
The scheme gave out 390,000 loans worth £25 billion in that period, the IFS found.
The Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme ran from 2013 to 2016 and was then relaunched from July 2025.
This offered 105,000 mortgage guarantees in its first run, worth £15.8 billion.
However, the scheme did little to improve social mobility, the financial watchdog said today.
The IFS said the mortgage guarantee scheme had a “limited” effect on housing affordability because most homebuyers were constrained by incomes, not the cost of a deposit.
An IFS report today said the equity loan scheme was more helpful with housing affordability, but even this had a “muted” impact as it was constrained to new build homes.
The IFS added that the equity loan scheme mostly helped high earners buy houses, despite being designed to help aspiring homeowners.
The two help-to-buy schemes were most helpful to people in London and the South East and those among the higher income groups, the think tank’s report said.
The report said: “Since these individuals would normally be expected to be able to save for a minimum deposit […], it is likely that these schemes accelerated their first home purchase by a few years rather than making the difference between becoming a homeowner or not in the longer term.
“The schemes seem neither to have entrenched inequalities in housing affordability based on parental background nor to have boosted social mobility.”
IFS research economist Bee Boileau said: “[A new help to buy scheme] could increase social mobility and reduce inequalities when getting on the housing ladder, but would also increase the exposure of both the government and potential borrowers to housing market downturns.”
