Help Me If You Can, I'm Feeling Down & I Do Appreciate You Being ’Round
Labour’s Help To Buy Mark II (Your First Home scheme) could lift down in the dumps housing supply. It has been appreciated by the stock markets as housebuilders’ shares prices have rocketed.
The Deceuninck commercial team also think so. And we are grateful to them for this timely opinion piece. The scheme was launched on Saturday 26 September 2026.
This is a ‘Mark II’ of the original Help to Buy Scheme. It is designed to do exactly the same thing, which is to help first time buyers get onto the housing market and create mobility in that market that sees homeowners finally see sales chains open up; and give housebuilders an incentive to build.
The first version of the scheme had considerable success…although interest rates (and the threat of interest rates rising again) were not the barriers they are today.
Good news
However, we at Deceuninck have to be optimistic and be ready to help are partners grasp the nettle in a sector which has been devoid of good news for some time. We believe Your First Home may just be the injection of impetus that construction and the building products supply chain, including the window and door sector, needs.
The proposed scheme will give eligible first-time buyers purchasing a new-build property access to a 20% government-backed equity loan, with deposits expected to start at 2.5%.
The detail is still to come at the Budget, so we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, however, the government has been very clear about what it wants the scheme to achieve: reduce the deposit barrier, make mortgage payments more affordable and stimulate the new-build market.
Confidence in the markets
The stock market has already reacted. Shares in major housebuilders, including Barratt Redrow, Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon, rose following the announcement. It’s an early sign of investor confidence in the scheme’s potential to boost new-build demand, even though the detail is still to come.
For housebuilders, that could help address one of the biggest constraints on development: confidence that homes coming out of the ground can be sold.
And if that unlocks sites and increases build rates, the opportunity travels all the way down the supply chain to us!
Reason for optimism
There are lots of variables and given wider volatility in the global economy nothing is guaranteed, but if you look at the original Help to Buy: Equity Loan scheme, there is genuine reason for optimism.
We know what this kind of intervention can do.
Help to Buy supported more than 387,000 home purchases and according to Homes England, that was around one in three new homes sold over the life of the scheme. If Your First Home can stimulate demand in a similar way, the opportunity won’t stop with the housebuilders, it will feed directly through to fabricators and installers and the wider building products supply chain and of course construction per se.
Opportunities
We shouldn’t pretend that one scheme suddenly fixes every challenge facing housebuilding. It won’t. But confidence matters.
If Your First Home helps more first-time buyers purchase new homes, it gives developers greater confidence to build. Greater confidence supports volumes. And greater volumes create opportunity throughout the supply chain.
Are you ready?
The question is whether you’re ready to take advantage of it? If new build starts moving, housebuilders will need suppliers with the products, capacity and service to move with them.
With dedicated new build and commercial support and some game changing product development on the horizon, Deceuninck is pre-primed for new build growth.
We believe that it’s a market worth being ready for. Check out how we can help on the link below.
Picture with thanks to Deceuninck: Cheaper mortgages, lower cost properties and a government subsidy could see more first-time buyers into newly built homes.
The just launched Your First Home scheme, launched to coincide with the Labour Party Conference could be just what the housing and home building market needs.
