The Help to Buy scheme has delivered a £900m return on investment to the Exchequer so far, and is expected to generate £2bn in profit for the government once all loans are repaid along with accrued interest.

Using government data, the new report by the Home Builders Federation, Road to Redemption, found that across 154,275 loans that have been fully repaid by homeowners, the government had received an uplift on the original loan value of around 9%. This represents a ‘profit’ of £718m with a further £229m in interest accrued to date.

Launched by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013, the scheme helped first-time buyers to obtain equity loans of up to 40% of a new build property’s value in London (from 2016 onwards) and up to 20% outside of London.