> Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help...
All these do is allow people to borrow more which increases the demand for housing, pushing prices up further. As a home owner you want the government to past more help to buy schemes because these schemes will always inadvertently raise the price of your home because of supply & demand dynamics.
> except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage
The reason house prices are up is because the government have been helping people to buy while pumping money into the economy to ensure people and businesses don’t have to bare the economic consequences of the recession. This is while we had another 300,000 migrants arrive who also need to be homed. If you want house prices to fall you basically need to do the exact opposite. If governments didn’t intervene people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay more for housing and might instead be forced to sell their home like you would expect to see in a recession. And as I touched on before, if governments didn’t import people to prop up GDP growth, housing demand would crash. Btw, I’m not making a political judgement about whether this is good or bad. Recessions suck, but historically they have been good equalisers because those with nothing to lose, lose nothing, while those with homes and businesses lose greatly.
Also to your point on affordability, everyone with kids under the age of forty in my family live in social housing and those who own their own homes and have good jobs are the ones who are childless. I don’t think this is a coincident — these groups clearly have different priorities. This anecdote is also supported by evidence that educational achievement is negatively correlated with birth rates.