The Gap Between Intent and Reality I read the IFS analysis this week and it confirmed what I've been watching happen for years. Help to Buy was meant to democratise property ownership. Instead, it became another tool that worked brilliantly for people who already had options. The numbers tell the story. Higher earners got more out of it. Lower-income households got less. This isn't a scandal or a surprise to anyone who's actually worked with people trying to build something on a tight budget. It's just how these things work when you don't think through the mechanics. I see this pattern constantly. A policy gets designed with good intentions. It launches. And then the people it was supposed to help discover that they can't actually use it because something fundamental about how they operate doesn't fit the shape of the solution. The Problem With One-Size Schemes Help to Buy assumed a specific scenario. You needed to buy a house. You had some capital already. You could navigate a mortgage application. You could sustain the payments once you owned it. You had credit history that looked acceptable to a bank. Now, if you're on a lower income, at least one of those things probably isn't true. Maybe you don't have the deposit. Maybe you can't get credit because you've had a rough year. Maybe you can't afford the payments even with the scheme's help because your income isn't stable. Maybe you don't understand the paperwork because no one's explained it clearly. The scheme didn't account for any of this. It was built for a middle ground that felt normal to the people designing it. Everyone else had to fit into that shape or go without. I've sat across tables from people running small businesses who faced the exact same problem. A funding scheme opens up. It looks perfect on the website. But when you actually try to apply, you realise it requires you to have already solved the problem you're trying to solve. You need three years of accounts to borrow money. You need to prove you don't need it to be allowed to have it. Why Lower-Income Households Got Left Behind There are three things at play here. First, information asymmetry. If you've got money, you've probably got an accountant or a financial advisor who tells you about these schemes and walks you through them. If you haven't got money, you find out about them from the news, and you're trying to figure out the details yourself. That's a massive disadvantage. Second, the scheme required flexibility that lower-income households don't have. You needed to be able to save for a deposit while the scheme was available. You needed to be ready to move quickly when you found a property. You needed to be able to absorb the risk if something went wrong. Stability is a luxury. Third, and this is the one no one talks about, the scheme didn't actually solve the underlying problem. It didn't make houses cheaper. It didn't increase supply. It just made it slightly easier to borrow more money for something that was already unaffordable. For someone on a lower income, that's not help. That's a trap. What This Means for Anyone Building Something If you're running a small business, especially one that operates in or serves lower-income communities, this matters to you. It means you can't assume that a government scheme or a funding programme is actually going to do what it says it'll do. You have to test it against the reality of how people actually work. I've seen this with clients at ALIRA. Someone hears about a grant that sounds perfect. They spend weeks applying. They get rejected or they get the money but find they can't actually use it the way they thought because of conditions they missed. The time wasted is the real cost. The Help to Buy story also tells you something about how policy gets made. It gets made by people who don't actually talk to the people it's supposed to help. If the designers had spent an afternoon with people on lower incomes trying to buy a house, they would have built something completely different. The Real Lesson Policies and schemes fail lower-income users because they're designed by people without lived experience of lower-income constraints. That's not an accusation. It's a fact about how information flows and who gets listened to. For you, this means two things. One, don't assume that help that exists is actually available to you. Test it. Talk to someone who's already used it. Read the small print. Make sure it actually solves your problem before you spend time chasing it. Two, if you're building something that serves people with less money, don't design it the way Help to Buy was designed. Actually talk to them. Understand what stops them. Make your solution fit their life, not the other way around. Help to Buy was a decent idea executed in a way that ignored the reality of who actually needed help. That's forgivable in policy. It's not forgivable in business. Your customers will tell you if you get it wrong, and they'll go somewhere else. What to do this week If you're thinking about applying for a scheme or grant that's been announced, find someone who's already used it and ask them what surprised them. Not the marketing version. The actual experience. One conversation will save you hours. If you're building something, spend 20 minutes this week writing down the three biggest constraints your customers actually face. Not the ones you assume they face. The ones you've heard directly. Then check whether your product or service actually makes those constraints easier. If it doesn't, that's your next problem to solve.