The sheer audacity of Cameron: The PR 'Help to Buy' stunt for a 'single mum' which isn't quite what it seems!

[ttosca]

This looks like the entire thing was fabricated as a PR stunt:

legalaidandme.proboards.com/thread/8301/audacity-cameron-hypocrisy-help-buy?post-20923=undefined

I've just read this. I'm sure they think we are all incredibly stupid.

That is classic bloody Cameron. I swear he needs a better PR/Media team, they keep getting shit like this wrong.

Check out the woman's Twitter feed for her side of the story. That blog doesn't give all the facts, and the way the woman has been hounded is fairly disgraceful.

Her twitter account is now protected, so her side is not available. But I must say, this reads like a leftwing version of a DM hatchet job. Proper journalists put allegations to a person before printing them. Neither this blogger nor the DM do this. The story fits my political leanings but I am deeply uneasy about how it has been done, and wouldn't be surprised to see it unleashing quite a lot of misogynistic vitriol on this woman, which really does not fit my political leanings at all.

You have to admit it looks pretty dodgy.

I would love to hear her side of the story.

She split from her partner 6months ago and the help to buy scheme is for properties upto £600k so not just for people on low incomes. Also her car is a company car. And she negotiated a good deal on the house through her employers, good for her!

What Potus said. Bought house in December so not on Land Reg yet.

I'm not sure it's the best-designed policy in the world, but opponents are playing the media case study, not the ball.

Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, the Help to Buy scheme really shouldn't be for properties up to £600K. It's a poorly designed scheme that won't actually help 'hardworking families' and may actually hurt them.

Also, Sharon is not the typical person 'hardworking mum' the Twitter stunt is trying to portray her as, as most mum's won't have a BMW convertible lent to them from work, nor will they get a discount on property.

I'm glad the facts of the case came to live. Overall, I still think it's terribly misleading.

I agree ttosca it is misleading. You wouldn't think of someone able to afford a mortgage on a 600k property as needing help would you? Cameron's an idiot.

Hang on, she didn't pay anywhere near 600K for the property. It was around 135K, wasn't it?

As the threshold for the scheme, 600K seems very high but TBH if you look at rent comparisons in eg London, you can see comparisons with rent. I'm not sure but I'd rather see people have the opportunity to buy a home rather than the property snapped up by a BTL landlord.

Difficult to have one rule in a country with a massively diverse housing market, I guess. Ditto cars. Some people have a company one, some people say they have to have two because of where they live, some don't have a car at all through either choice or circumstance.

Help to Buy was never about supporting low-income families or single parents, or anyone in any kind of particular need. No house-purchase scheme is going to be particularly helpful to the poor. It's a policy for exactly the middle England that this woman seems to represent.

The Cameron photo-op is tacky, and about as misleading as most PR stunts are (the seemingly single mother gives it a "feel" of supporting needier groups). But it is no more misleading than PR in general and this woman's house purchase certainly doesn't contradict the essence of what Help to Buy is.

The element of it that seems nearest to dishonesty is that this woman works for the firm that sold the house (if I understand correctly). Since estate agent firms have more to gain than most of us from Help to Buy, this firm benefits from the PR stunt and perhaps the woman got a knock-down on the price for helping to set it up?

No it definitely says she paid 135k. I just mentioned 600k it is the cut off point for this particular scheme.

I can see that this little pr stunt was misleading, and was clearly not handled very well, but I don't see what the actual problem is.

What difference does it make that this woman has a decent career and a husband with the same? Does it make her unworthy of consideration from the government or something?

'Help to Buy' - more like help to buy votes.

Hold on a minute. This person is a new single mum working as a sales director in a Southampton estate agency. She's far from being in dire poverty, but she won't exactly be rolling in it either. Lone parenthood is more expensive. I'd be surprised if her on-target earnings are above 60k, and they're probably quite a bit lower.

And most importantly, Help to Buy was explicitly designed to aid people who could afford repayments but didn't have enough savings for a deposit. It is a Tory policy, after all!

I'd say that this person is the very embodiment of the scheme, and it's not at all misleading of Osborne's/Cameron's intentions:

• young
• single mum (this is Notting Hilll Toryism which is socially and economically liberal)
• aspirational grafters (drives a nice car, well-groomed, pushing her career hard)
• earning fairly well, but still couldn't get on the ladder without the scheme, even though she works in an estate agents

Don't get me wrong, I think the scheme is idiotic (Fannie Mae, anyone? Property asset bubble, anyone?). But the idiocy will only show in future years and in the meantime people like this person will benefit, and this case example shows it.