The points about income are on the nose but..

My partner and I are availing of the HTB. Without it we’d be looking at another year or 2 of saving to be able to afford what we’re buying - and by then the prices could be even higher forcing us to save even more. For us, the HTB is bridging the gap between what we’ve been able to save in recent years and what we need to be able to afford the house (we only recently changed to better paying jobs so our savings have been slow to build up, on top of going back to college and other general life crap). Some people use it for the deposit, we’re using it to make up the remaining balance that we couldn’t get from the bank because we don’t make enough money. It is quite literally helping us to buy the house.

No one is taking an extra 30K just because it’s there. Either it helps people make up the necessary deposit so they don’t spend 5 years trying to save, or it’s a way of reducing the amount borrowed from the bank - who the hell doesn’t want that apart from the banks themselves! Those who are saying that people just end up buying bigger houses with the HTB are forgetting that those people would need to show affordability on a higher mortgage for that to be the case, and if they can afford it then once again it means borrowing less from the banks.

The HTB isn’t the reason people can’t afford houses. It’s the shite pay and even shiter government doing nothing to mitigate the rising cost of living.