The pattern I keep seeing The IFS analysis landed this week showing Help to Buy mostly benefited higher earners. I wasn't surprised. I've sat with enough people running their own thing to recognise this pattern: a policy designed to solve a problem actually solves a different problem for a different group of people. Help to Buy was meant to get more people on the property ladder. Instead, it inflated prices and handed most of the benefit to people who already had options. That's not a failure of intention. That's a failure of systems thinking. I work with businesses every day trying to solve problems they think they have, only to discover the real problem was somewhere else entirely. This is the same thing, just at policy scale. The gap between intention and mechanics Here's what most people don't see when they're designing a scheme like this. They think: "We'll give people money to buy a house. Houses cost less. People buy houses." It's linear. It's wrong. What actually happened was different. The scheme put money into a system where supply was fixed. You can't print more houses in 12 months. So what happens? Prices rise. The people who already owned property or had enough capital to move quickly captured that value. The people the scheme was meant to help? They were still priced out, just at a higher level. I've seen this exact dynamic with businesses. You give a small business a grant to hire someone. What actually happens? Their rent goes up. Their suppliers know they've got more money. The cash evaporates into the system without changing the underlying constraint. The constraint here wasn't money. It was property. For lower-income buyers, it was also time, deposit size, and mortgage qualification. The scheme addressed one variable in a multi-variable problem and acted surprised when the others didn't move. Why lower-income buyers lost out Lower-income households needed something different from what Help to Buy offered. They needed help with deposits, sure. But they also needed help qualifying for mortgages, managing the process, understanding what they could actually afford without overextending. Help to Buy gave them extra purchasing power. It didn't give them the information architecture or the financial buffer that higher earners had naturally. A household earning £80,000 has access to financial advisers, has family who've bought property, understands mortgage products. A household earning £35,000 doesn't have those networks. They need different support. What happened instead? Higher earners used Help to Buy to move up the ladder faster. Lower earners who accessed it stretched themselves into mortgages they shouldn't have taken. Some of them lost those properties when interest rates moved or life circumstances changed. That's not just a policy failure. That's causing actual harm. The root cause: nobody mapped the system If someone had actually run a 5 Whys analysis on the real problem, they would have asked: "Why don't lower-income people own homes?" Not "Why can't they afford the purchase price?" Those are different questions with completely different answers. The answers would have been: because they can't save deposits reliably, because they can't access good mortgage products, because they lack the information to navigate the process, because they don't have the social capital to know what's actually possible. Some of those things money solves. Most of them don't. A proper systems map would have shown the real constraints. I use these tools with clients running their own operations all the time. You can't fix something you haven't actually mapped. Help to Buy was designed by people looking at one constraint in isolation. What this means if you're running something The reason I'm writing about a housing policy is because this is how most strategies fail. Not from bad intentions. From incomplete diagnosis. You think your problem is sales. You add a salesperson. Sales don't move. That's because your real problem was product clarity or market fit. You've now just hired someone to sell something nobody wants more efficiently. You think your problem is cost. You cut spending. You actually go slower because you've cut the thing that was making you move. You've optimised for the wrong variable. The only way I've seen this work differently is when someone actually stops and asks: "What's the real constraint here?" Not the obvious one. The actual one. For Help to Buy, the real constraints were structural and informational. Money was the visible problem. It wasn't the actual problem. The scheme threw money at it and called it solved. What to do this week Pick one thing in your business that isn't working the way you want it to. Not the thing you're most frustrated about. The thing that's been nagging at you for 2-3 months. On Monday, write down what you think the problem is. Then ask yourself: "If I fixed that, would the actual outcome change?" Be honest. Write down what would actually need to be different. Second, if you're working with limited resources, map what's actually constraining you before you spend money or time trying to fix it. Is it money? Is it information? Is it time? Is it something structural about how the system works? Help to Buy teaches us that throwing resources at the wrong constraint just makes the real problem worse and wastes what you had to spend.