Are you aware of the current situation impacting on many first time buyers via the Help To Buy scheme across the UK? It relates to a deadline for new build homes to be ‘build complete’.
Global events over the last few years have caused a detrimental effect to supply chains across developments in the UK, including our own potential purchase, causing longer lead times and delivery timescales on key products and materials. This has had an extremely negative impact on the completion times of reserved homes via the Help To Buy scheme. Time and money has been wasted.
Help To Buy deadline – 31st December 2022
There is a Help to Buy Deadline of 31st December 2022 to have a home ‘build complete’. Due to the circumstances detailed above, construction companies are not going to be able to deliver homes by this date. The construction company for our new build have reached out to The Home Builders Federation and Homes England to support an extension to this date, but they are not currently accepting this request. 4 other families within our development, as well as ourselves, have been impacted by this. Many more Help To Buy buyers across the UK will be impacted.
We put our confidence into the Help To Buy scheme
Our hopes and dreams of owning our own home are hanging by a thread. The private landlord of our current rental property is increasing our rent, which is one of the many reasons we want to buy our own home and the Help To Buy scheme was supposed to help us achieve this. We have put our confidence into the Help To Buy scheme and the government is failing first time buyers like ourselves due to properties not being ‘build complete’ by a few weeks. We have been waiting in this process for over 8 months and to have this scheme fail us by a matter of a few weeks is extremely upsetting. Nowhere on the government Help To Buy: Equity Loan page (https://www.gov.uk/help-to-buy-equity-loan) does it mention the 31st December 2022 deadline, which we believe to be misleading.
The Help To Buy scheme is supposed to be a government scheme which helps young people who are first time buyers to get onto the property ladder. Additionally, our construction company also attempted to find an alternative option with Homes England to potentially move our Help To Buy offer onto a ‘ready’ house in another phase, due to buyers pulling out. This suggestion was rejected. They also requested if the same could be applied to the show home, which again was refused by Homes England.
We’ve lost our Help To Buy offer due to the December deadline
Today (11th November 2022) we have learned the above situation has resulted in us losing our Help To Buy offer. The legal deadline to register for the Help To Buy scheme was 31st October 2022, this does not leave other developers enough time to complete homes. At the moment we are digesting the information, contacting our local MP and looking at what our options are, but we currently feel let down by the government, the government departments involved and the scheme itself.
If/when I have updates about this situation, I’ll most likely post again on my blog. Thank you for reading.
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