15/05/2026
Two of Britain's biggest banks made headlines this week.
Santander launched a mortgage with just £10,000 down.
Lloyds undercut them with £5,000.
The press called it help for first-time buyers. But a smaller deposit doesn't make a home more affordable. It makes the debt bigger, the term longer, and the borrower more fragile.
We've seen this before. Every time the housing market stalls, the answer is the same: more leverage, looser lending, lower barriers. It works for a while. Then the cycle turns, equity gets wiped out, and families are left servicing a mortgage well into retirement for an asset worth less than they paid.
The problem isn't the size of the deposit. It's structural: supply, planning, wages, land policy, taxation. None of it gets solved by handing people a bigger rope.
Look at Singapore. Property prices sit above the UK's, yet around 90% of households own their home. Not through cheap debt, but through deliberate long-term policy: public housing at scale, restricted speculation, and a system built to create owners, not borrowers.
More debt is not the same as more opportunity.
Is low-deposit lending genuine help, or just the next bubble in slow motion?
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