Support for first-time buyers could come in the form of boosted savings or new affordable homes as experts warn Britain’s housing market is “the most dysfunctional it has been for decades”.
Major developers are slashing their targets for the number of new houses they hope to build this year, while housebuilders have “slowed down and scaled back” projects because of serious concerns about whether there are enough buyers to purchase new build homes.
As a result, Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey are believed to be working up some form of support for first-time buyers in a bid to grease the wheels of the housing market ahead of the Budget next month.
Everything you need to know about the Russian elections
The pro-Putin ruling United Russia party retained its decisive majority in the national parliament, near-complete election results showed on Monday, while the anti-war Yabloko party appeared to have won a tiny foothold in one regional parliament.
The background
- Vladimir Putin had cast the three-day election to the State Duma – the first since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022 – as a test of support for the war.
- Elections for some regional parliaments and governors were held at the same time.
- In a tightly controlled political system, which critics say does not tolerate genuine dissent, few surprises were expected.
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A closer look at the results
With over 95 per cent of the vote counted, Ella Pamfilova, chair of the Central Electoral Commission, said United Russia had won a resounding victory with 57.83 per cent, up from the 49.8 per cent that it won in the last parliamentary election, in 2021.
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What else you need to know
- United Russia was set to control 355 seats or nearly 80 per cent of the 450-seat Duma, a total that includes results in individual constituencies.
- That would maintain its constitutional majority – enabling it to pass laws and initiate amendments to the constitution without support of other parties.
- Pamfilova said three other parties had made it into parliament – the Communists with 13.81 per cent, the ultra-nationalist LDPR with 8.98 per cent, and the New People party with 7.96 per cent.
read the i paper’s latest analysis
What Putin’s paranoia will lead him to do next
“Stalin knew how to run Russia and how to get respect. Vladimir Putin could learn something from him.”
The BBC has removed several sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look on iPlayer after deciding some of the comedy show’s material “no longer works today”.
Controversial material removed
The sketch comedy show, starring comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, originally ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010.
However, some material has been removed, including scenes featuring war re-enactors in Blackface, a joke about Jimmy Savile and a sketch about a contestant on a makeover show wearing a burka, reported.
What did the BBC say?
This is a 20-year-old sketch ; in consultation with the programme makers, we have included the ones still work today not the ones don’t.
bbc spokesperson
Flights disrupted across north of UK – what you need to know
Flights across the UK – particularly Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England – are facing disruption due to a “technical issue” with air traffic control.
Here is everything you need to know – including the airports affected.
What caused the problem?
Nats, which runs air traffic control, has said the issue at its Prestwick centre in Ayrshire is “now fixed”, and that it is working to “safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can”. It said the glitch was a “connectivity issue with part of our systems network”.
Second failure in two weeks
This is the second failure at Nats in less than a fortnight.
But it said this most recent disruption has “nothing to do” with the software defect that led to the cancellation of 2,000 flights across the UK earlier this month.
EasyJet said this “once again calls into questions the resilience of Nats’ systems”.
Airports report disruption
Airports across the UK have reported varying degrees of disruption. They include:
- and – Arrivals and departures.
- – Issue causing some delays.
- – Experiencing “some delays”.
- – Urging passengers to contact their airline.
- – Experiencing some delays and cancellations similar to other airports.
- – Experiencing “some disruption” and “working closely” with Nats to resolve the issue.
- – Warns that there “will be disruption” to both arrivals and departures.
Cindy Crawford’s son Presley Gerber dies in rehab aged 27
Presley Gerber, the son of supermodel Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, has died at the age of 27.
The former model died on Sunday at a rehab facility, according to the Los Angeles county medical examiner. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
A closer look at the detail
Gerber, who was the eldest child of the celebrity couple, and brother of model Kaia Gerber, had spoken openly about his mental health and drug use in recent years.
His sister mentioned his “decade-long struggle with drug addiction” in the September 2026 issue of .
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Mental health struggles
Having struggled with mental health, depression and some other things that come along with that, I think that whether I help one person or a hundred people get out of that place that I was in at one point in my life, that’s all I need to do.
Speaking to podcast in 2023, Gerber hoped that sharing his story would help others suffering with mental health issues.
Life in the limelight
- Gerber had been a model like his mother and younger sister Kaia, making his runway debut for Italian label Moschino aged just 16.
- He went on to model for brands including Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and Bottega Veneta.
- Gerber posted a video about undergoing drug withdrawal treatment in the months before his death, though the cause of his death was not disclosed.
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Family asks for privacy
- Allie Jenkins, a representative for Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber, told : “The family is asking for privacy during this very difficult and painful time.”
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Badenoch pledges to bring back tax-free shopping for tourists
Kemi Badenoch has promised to revive a tax-free shopping scheme for tourists by reversing a post-Brexit rule change.
The decision to scrap the VAT refund scheme for international visitors in 2021 left the UK “less competitive” than many other European holiday destinations as the country left the EU, the Tories said.
Business chiefs hail ‘pro-growth’ policy change
Badenoch said the policy was letting down businesses.
Business chiefs, including the bosses of Fortnum & Mason and Paul Smith, hailed the policy change as “pro-growth” and “pro-jobs”.
Losing out to ‘rival cities’
We have iconic retailers, inventive designers and brilliant manufacturers, but they are being let down by a tax policy that is chasing their customers away. Holidaymakers are choosing rival cities in other countries for the simple reason that it saves them money.
Kemi badenoch, lEADER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
A closer look at the detail
- Spending by visitors remains 8 per cent lower than before the pandemic – despite numbers returning to pre-Covid levels, according to 2024 estimates from tourism agency VisitBritain.
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Treasury: ‘UK visitors can claim VAT’
Almost every European country offers tax-free shopping for tourists, except the UK – although the minimum spend varies.
A Treasury spokesperson said “visitors can still claim VAT relief where the items purchased are shipped directly to their home country as exports” and that it is working to “welcome 50 million international visitors a year to the UK by 2030”.
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All the latest Earl Spencer revelations as royal row continues
A war of words has broken out after Earl Spencer made a series of damning claims about the King in a new memoir about his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is due to be published on Tuesday. Here are some key claims made in excerpts from the book released so far.
‘We’ll forget her soon enough’
Spencer claims he and Charles argued over arrangements for his sister’s funeral in 1997 and the King told him: “Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”.
Spencer has also said he believes the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister.
Other key claims made
- Spencer has written of how Charles’s phone call following the car crash in 1997 “sounded strangely matter-of-fact”.
- “[Charles] sounded giddily elated – like a lottery winner, I remember thinking at the time,” Spencer writes.
- In another extract, Spencer told of his memories of the funeral, and his concern for Harry, after he observed a “lack of obvious care”.
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While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss.
Buckingham Palace spokesman
King accused of gaslighting
Spencer has accused the King of gaslighting him and called his response a “rather poor imitation of the ‘recollections may vary’ quote” – the late Queen’s response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s allegations in their Oprah Winfrey interview, The Mail on Sunday reports.
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Watch more from The i Paper
A Government spokesperson said “There are no current plans to introduce a new Help to Buy scheme”; however, The i Paper understands that a different offer for first-time buyers is being considered.
This could include a new, targeted equity loan scheme like New Labour’s HomeBuy Direct – which was actually the forerunner to Help to Buy and launched in 2008.
A new First Time Buyer ISA with no upper age limit is already under review and a third option could be to build homes which are specifically reserved for first-time buyers, offered at slightly cheaper than market prices.
Average UK mortgage rates now sit above 5 per cent due to inflation expectations and global economic volatility, crushing buyers’ borrowing power at a time when British housebuilding is already in the doldrums.
Data for the 12 months leading up to June 2026 suggests that about 203,000 new homes were delivered in England that year, far short of the 300,000 needed to meet the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
The situation is so serious that Britain’s economic watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), may now downgrade the growth forecast that had been attached to Labour’s housebuilding plans, which could have a knock-on effect on housebuilders’ ability to get investment as well as the cost of government borrowing.
Certain government advisors and housebuilders themselves are understood to be pushing the Government to “do something like Help to Buy”.
Off the back of a new evaluation of the scheme’s equity loans for first-time buyers, which found that it delivered £25bn of social value to Britain and helped to boost both homeownership and housebuilding, there is appetite in Westminster to find a way to get credit to households that wouldn’t have been able to buy a home without government support.
However, housing policy expert and former government advisor Rose Grayston said “any first-time buyer support needs to be carefully designed in light of higher interest rates, low house price growth and threats to the economy”.
“We can’t transplant a solution from ten years ago onto today’s economic conditions and expect to get the same results,” Grayston said.
House prices ‘no longer rising’ – this is why
There is valid cause for concern about any intervention in the housing market.
According to expert housing market analyst Neal Hudson, Britain’s housing market is currently experiencing a “long and slow correction” in house prices which mostly looks like “stagnation” with prices “no longer rising” except in London and the south east of England where house prices are falling according to the Office for National Statistics.
Some Whitehall insiders even fear that what is unfolding is, in fact, a protracted “crash” in house prices.
“House prices have stopped rising, but there have been limited falls so far,” Hudson explains in a more measured way. “Instead, we are reliant on a long and slow improvement in affordability as wages catch up with house prices.”
In the short-term, however, the situation is causing pain for housebuilders and, by extension, Britain’s economy as a whole.
Some housebuilders have been “forced” to stop buying new land while others have “slowed down and scaled back” their building projects because of serious concerns about whether “there are enough buyers out there to buy the new housing they would build”, according to Steve Turner, executive director of the House Builders Federation (HBF).
Major developers such as Barratt Redrow have cut their forecasts for the number of new homes they hope to build this year. Britain’s biggest housebuilder, which built 17,667 homes between July 2025 and June 2026, had been aiming to increase output in its current financial year to between 17,700 and 18,200 homes. However, they now expect to build somewhere between 17.500 and 17,900.
Burnham’s government finds itself in a tight spot when it comes to housing. The former prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, had pinned much hope on flagship planning reforms – now the Planning and Infrastucture Act – in the hope that cutting red tape would speed up housebuilding.
However, so far, even though there has been an uptick in planning applications, it has not translated into completed new homes.
Grayston explains that Labour cannot expect “the planning system to solve a macroeconomic problem.” She said: “If we look at London in particular, we’ve now got lots of planning permissions, but there isn’t the demand from buyers who can get mortgages in the economy to build those out.”
Hudson and other housing experts have long been warning that Britain’s housing market was stalled because house prices were so high that interest rate hikes – like those triggered by Putin’s war in Ukraine and Liz Truss’s so-called “mini-budget” – stretched affordability for buyers beyond what banks would lend.
Meanwhile, Turner said it was no longer “financially viable” for builders to develop some sites “because of additional taxes like the building safety levy and landfill tax that have been layered onto housebuilders”.
He also warned that inflation of materials costs had pushed builders to their limit. “As a result of the layering on of new taxes, policy costs and material price inflation, it now costs £76,000 per house more to build a house compared to five years ago,” Turner said.
“The industry is having to reduce its outgoings and slow down building because of these challenges. We have seen many SME builders go out of business,” he added.
The options for help
Grayston says that potential solutions could include releasing land from the Green Belt specifically for homes that don’t rely on demand for market sale, like social homes, Build to Rent and, potentially, homes that are specifically for first-time buyers.
These first-time buyer homes, should be “available at discounted market rates because if you bring down the price of the home and you bring down the mortgage that people need to take out”, she said.
Hudson said that Burnham had inherited “a load of underlying issues that have been building up in the housing market and brought to the fore by higher interest rates.”
“We need more clarity of thinking about how we actually deal with them,” Hudson added.
He suggested one way to solve the problem would be to “subsidise demand” by bringing forward “a load of social and affordable housing funding” to ensure that developers could build purely affordable housing while also upping government funding to ensure the affordable housing included in private developments actually gets built because this would “de-risk market developments”.
So far, despite promising a landmark package of £39 billion for social and affordable housing (SAHP) over ten years, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has only managed to get £10 billion out of the door.
As part of this announcement, she told The i Paper that there was a “tilt” towards council house building. This was met with anger from some housing associations who deliver social and affordable homes.
Executives from one major housing association said they were “f*****g livid” with the decisions, arguing that they are the only organisations which can “actually build new homes” at the moment due to the constraints private developers of homes for market sale are facing.
Housing and Planning Minister Pennycook has sought to reassure housing associations.
Speaking at the Housing Community Summit on 9 September, he said: “Our housing market is resilient, and I have no doubt that it will not take long to recover, but as this audience knows only too well, these are tough times for housebuilding in England.”
The minister went on to say that “much more can and will be done” to ensure that both councils and housing associations can “flourish”.