These are strange times for UK housebuilders. House prices remain stable or rising in most parts of the country, and the big listed builders – with a couple of exceptions – continue to report record results and strong demand. While official housebuilding statistics for the year to March are not due out until November, the Home Builders Federation said recently that it expects completions to have risen again – making it the sixth consecutive year of growth.

And yet the share prices of the publicly quoted firms are down on average by one-fifth since the start of the year, with the worst performer – step forward, Crest Nicholson – having seen its valuation pretty much halved. There’s no doubt that the City, for one, is spooked.

Analysts put the falls down to a combination of issues: the sluggish London market; consumer fears ahead of Brexit; and the feeling that we’re coming to the end of a property cycle. But probably the biggest drag anchor on the sector is the one issue that has lain behind its recent extraordinary profitability – the government’s Help to Buy scheme. Speculation has grown in recent months that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, will use next week’s Budget to either cancel or rein in the five-year-old scheme that by March this year had already stood behind 169,000 new-build house sales worth a cumulative £42.2bn.

“If you’re effectively subsidising the price of something that’s already too expensive then you’re just putting more money into the system”

Matt Kilcoyne, Adam Smith Institute

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