Low paid workers will be allowed to use benefits to buy homes

Families and low paid workers will be able to use benefits to save deposits and make mortgage payments, Boris Johnson has announced. The Right to Buy will also be extended to housing association tenants and there will be a mortgage review, looking at how low-deposit mortgages can be extended.

Under the plan, leaseholders will also be given the right to buy freeholds, with discounts of up to 90% for those “trapped with egregious, escalating ground rents”. The Prime Minister revealed the plans in a speech in Blackpool just days after surviving a bruising confidence vote in his leadership.

He said the move would "give a route to help some of the lowest paid get on the housing ladder", but charities, opposition MPs and mortgage providers have raised concerns over the plan.

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Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy said: "There are real practical problems, to qualify for Universal Credit, you've got to have savings of less than £16,000, which means that most people who the Government are trying to reach with this announcement are not going to have anything near the amount that they need for a deposit."

Housing charity Shelter chief executive Polly Neate added: “The Prime Minister’s housing plans are baffling, unworkable, and a dangerous gimmick. Hatching reckless plans to extend Right to Buy will put our rapidly shrinking supply of social homes at even greater risk."

Explaining his plan, Mr Johnson said: "When home ownership remains beyond the reach of a great many hard-working people, it’s neither right nor fair to put ever vaster sums of taxpayers’ money straight into the pocket of landlords.”

Around £30 billion a year was spent on