Britain to extend housing market stimulus scheme
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E-mail Xinhua, March 17, 2014
British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne Sunday announced a plan to extend the Help to Buy scheme for another four years to 2020 at a cost of around 6 billion pounds (or approximately 9.6 billion U.S. dollars).
Speaking on the British Broadcast Company (BBC) ahead of Wednesday's spring Budget speech, Osborne said the policy would help the building of 120,000 houses by the end of 2020, and it would only applies to the first phase of the scheme, which is designed for offering interest-free or low interest rate loans to new-build homes buyers.
The phase two of the stimulus policy, however, would see no change, said the Chancellor.
Help to Buy was supposed to be a surprise of the government's spring budget last year. With two phases of the scheme, which are Equity Loan and Mortgage Guarantee, British government can possibly lend the house buyers up to 20 percent of the cost of the new-build home and even offer mortgage guarantees to the buyers.
However, since its implementation last spring, controversies and criticism have been mounting, as it is reckoned helping to inflate the already high prices in London and the south-east England.
Vince Cable, British business secretary, appealed earlier this year to review the plan, in order to prevent another "property-linked boom-bust cycle."
In order to boost the houses building activities, Osborne announced that a "garden city" with an initial 15,000 houses will be built at Ebbsfleet in Kent shire, south-east England.
"In Ebbsfleet there is the land available, there is fantastic infrastructure with the high speed line," Osborne said.
"We're going to create an urban development corporation so we are going to create the instrument that allows this kind of thing to go ahead and cuts through a lot of the obstacles that often happen when you want to build these homes," he added.
Ebbsfleet has a stop on the high-speed rail line to the Channel Tunnel, according to BBC's report. Endi
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