From View From The Top, 4 November 2026
What the Budget didn’t do for housing — and how I would have written it.
Last week the Chancellor handed the housing market a lump of coal — enough to say he gave something, but not enough to keep anyone warm.
Ebenezer Scrooge kept one fire in the counting-house, and Bob Cratchit got one coal for it. Not none — Scrooge was too clever for none. One. Enough to keep the clerk at his desk. Not enough to warm him properly.
That’s how I read last week’s Budget. £4.7 billion to help people buy homes. £1.5 billion to help homes get built. Three pounds for buyers, one pound for builders — that’s one coal for the people who actually produce the thing everyone wants: housing.
They filled out the stockings early this year, so let me walk you through it the way Dickens would: past, present, and future. Because the future, as Scrooge found out, is the only part still open for negotiation.
THE GHOST OF BUDGETS PAST
We’ve seen this stocking before… Help to Buy put £29 billion of subsidised demand into a market that couldn’t build fast enough to meet it, and the government’s own evaluation told us where the money went: into prices, and into the margins of the volume housebuilders. I watched the same movie from the borrower’s side through the 2000s — cheap money chasing constrained supply doesn’t create homes, it reprices the ones that exist. Meanwhile the people who build at the margin, the SME developers doing 10 to 50 units at a time, went from nearly four in ten new homes in the late eighties to barely one in ten today. Every Christmas the same gift, and every year fewer SME builders.
THE GHOST OF BUDGETS PRESENT
What was actually in the stocking this year:
- £4.7 billion for Your First Home — a 2.5% deposit scheme with a government equity loan, launching Spring 2027. Help to Buy with a smaller engine; Zoopla reckons half the old scheme’s impact, maybe 30,000 buyers a year.
- £1.5 billion more for social and affordable housing. The coal.
- A First Time Buyer ISA — launching April 2029. A present you can open in three years.
- Stamp duty: untouched. The market that froze waiting for this Budget can stay frozen.
- Landlords: another two points on rental income — 24%, 44%, 49% by band. The exit door just got busier, and every seller taxed out shows up as a rent rise for exactly the tenants the scheme is meant to help.
- SME developers, planning capacity, development finance: not one line. Not one.
And standing at the door the whole time, hiding and dragging its chain, was Marley’s ghost — the gilt market. No rally, no riot. Translated: you didn’t make it worse. That’s the bar now. The chain, meanwhile, gets longer — £258.6 billion of issuance this year, up £7.4 billion, with debt interest running ~£14 billion over forecast and the Bank of England still expected to start hiking in November. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” Marley says. “I made it link by link.” Thirty years of deficits, link by link — and France found out last week what happens when the market starts counting the links.
THE GHOST OF BUDGETS YET TO COME
Scrooge’s question is the right one: are these the shadows of things that will be, or that may be only? Because there’s a version of this Budget still available to any chancellor willing to write it. So I wrote my version to share:
- A stamp duty holiday on new-build completions. Three years. Point demand exclusively at homes that don’t exist yet, so every pound puts a spade into the ground instead of repricing a Victorian terrace turned into HMOs.
- Bridge the SME developers to the National Housing Bank now. The £16 billion was announced in March. First-loss guarantees and revolving credit for 10–50 unit schemes should have been in this Budget with a start date — not left to work itself out while another year of planning consents expires unbuilt.
- A planning capacity grant with teeth. Fund the planners, then publish each authority’s determination times. The viability gap on small sites is mostly a time gap — every month in the system is finance cost the volume builders can absorb and the small ones can’t.
- Weight Your First Home toward delivery. Same £4.7 billion, but pointed at units built by SME developers and MMC factories — so it builds capacity, not just order books.
- Leave landlords alone for one Budget. Not because they’re sympathetic — because rental supply is part of the same system.
Total cost: a fraction of what was spent last Wednesday, that’s for sure, because most of it is guarantees, sequencing and the plumbing rather than real cheques. The hard part of housing policy was never finding money. It’s choosing builders over buyers when buyers vote.
HARD LANDING
A Budget that leaves the 10-year at 5.3% did nothing. Pipelines stay repriced. Portfolios stay exposed. The borrowers who made sense at these levels still make sense; the ones who didn’t still don’t. For lenders, this Budget changed one thing only: you can stop waiting for the cavalry on fiscal policy — no one is coming. Mark your book to the world as it is and accept it. No more avoiding the reality of reporting.
In the end, Scrooge changed because all the numbers were shown to him in one horrible evening. Chancellors get the same visit from the gilt market every morning — and unlike the ghosts, it doesn’t leave at dawn.
NEXT WEEK
Let’s have a look at The Bank that Doesn’t Lend and do a scorecard. The National Housing Bank was given £16bn and a mandate to fund SME builders. So far as I can tell it’s reached one housebuilder with £11m. So what’s gone wrong? Has it helped the SME housebuilder and put more homes on to the market as it was supposed to?
I’m recording a podcast on solving the England and London housing crisis with David Pralong of Maya Capital — next week’s will be the debrief: where we agreed, where we didn’t, and what surprised me. Touching on the Budget, technology and how we can do things better for housing.
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