Speaking at the launch of the Building Societies Association’s (BSA) ‘Stepping Up To The Mark’ report, Iain Cornish, chairman of the BSA, said that his organisation had found that many people were put off from applying as there were so many different stages to go through.
He also believed that government involvement could be holding back the success of the scheme.
He said: “The complexity of the products puts a lot of people off and we would see greater success if people could come directly to us, rather than having to be referred through the different people. What we want to see though is HomeBuy taken beyond government support and I think there is a demand for a purely private sector product.”
The BSA’s report insisted that this process could be complicated further by the three separate reviews currently being undertaken on HomeBuy.
Andy Nelson, senior regeneration manager at English Partnerships, admitted that much of the interest in HomeBuy it encountered came from people buying directly from developers, around which a scheme could be built.
However, Peter Williams, executive director of the Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association, believed that much of the problems associated with low-cost housing schemes stemmed from the fact that they were too fragmented.
He also acknowledged that there was a vacuum of information surrounding how successfully people migrated up the housing ladder from partial ownership to full ownership.
Cornish concurred and insisted that staircasing options on HomeBuy products, which helped people build up a greater stake in the property, were current being evaluated.
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