Candy Mountain

What could go wrong?

£50 billion would buy a £200,000 property for a quarter of a million families.

It’s very appealing on the face of it. What would be the catch in the government doing that and being a low or no interest mortgage broker?

Apart from anything else, placing mortgage approvals in the hands of functionaries would be an anti-corruption drive in itself.

And that would be worth the extra taxes, completely un-repaid to the taxpayer, the galloping house price inflation, the mortgage firms going bust as the best risks head for the zero interest rates, the extra taxes to bail them out, the black market in zero-interest bought-to-rent scams, the extra taxes to pay for the extra functionaries who'll run this zero-interest, zero-income scheme, the defaults, the extra taxes to top up the fund after the defaults, the extra taxes to pay people to police the scams, the sudden entry of organised crime into an artificial two-tier property market, the extra taxes to pay for the police investigations...

As the man said, what's the catch?