Borough’s fall in number of people using Help to Buy

registered Help to Buy builder, and costs no more than £600,000.

For anyone who meets all the criteria and can put down 5% of the deposit themselves, the government will lend them up to 20% of the cost of the house (rising to up to 40% in London).

Since the launch, the loans have been used to buy 169,102 properties up and down the country.

While most of these properties were bought by first time buyers, nearly 20% were purchased by people already on the property ladder.

The average cost of a home bought by first time buyers using the scheme at the start of 2018 was £255,000, but for non-first time buyers that figure came to £312,973.

A total of 19% of properties bought by first time buyers using the scheme were flats, compared with 5% of the properties bought by people who had already owned a home.

Meanwhile, just 24% of first time buyers were buying a detached house, compared with 54% of non-first time buyers.

There was also a difference in average income between first time buyers using the scheme and those already on the property ladder.

The average household income of first time buyers that bought a property using an equity loan at the start of this year was £49,358, while non-first time buyers had an average household income of £56,392.

The new figures do not include the Help to Buy Mortgage Guarantee scheme, which was discontinued in December 2016.