Budget comment from mortgage broker - "Your First Home won't work"

28 October 2026

Anthony Curtis, director of mortgage broker FORTO Finance, said:

"To my mind, this Budget just tinkered around the edges. John Healey ignored the property and housing sectors almost entirely.

"About the only thing we've got is the revived Help to Buy. Your First Home, which aims to help young people get on the property ladder, won't work half as well as the Chancellor imagines. The people who use it will leave themselves at a high risk of falling into negative equity. Mortgage professionals know what dangerous territory that is to be in.

"Healey needed to deregulate house building much further. Developers are ramping down their building in the south of England. It's too expensive to build. Taylor Wimpey has withdrawn from London altogether and Berkeley Group called a halt on buying land in London six months earlier. They represent the first dominos to fall – more will follow. While the government has brought back Help to Buy, there need to be new homes to buy. At this point, Your First Home is just Sturm und Drang, with no real action to stimulate the property industry.

"Instead, he should have made downsizers – buyers over 55 moving to a cheaper main home, say – exempt from stamp duty. It wouldn't have cost that much and it would have triggered a chain of further sales, each of which would have paid stamp duty. The cut would have helped a moribund property market and would have paid for itself via all the extra transactions. And it would have freed up large homes for families to buy. Given we aren't building our way out of the housing crisis any time soon, expanding the supply of available bedrooms sounds like a pretty smart move.

"The 2026 Budget missed the mark."