Forces Help to Buy Scheme
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the cost of the Forces Help to Buy Scheme was in each financial year since its introduction.
Answered by Al Carns
The Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) Forces Help to Buy (FHTB) scheme is an enduring policy which enables Service personnel to borrow up to 50 per cent of their salary, up to a maximum of £25,000 interest-free towards the purchase of a property.
As FHTB is a loan scheme, it is essentially self-funding, meaning that payments are funded from repayments. For that reason, specific allocations of funds are not provided to the Front Line Commands for this purpose. The costs of administering the scheme could not be disaggregated from wider budgets without incurring disproportionate cost.
The MOD publishes summary statistics on applications, payments and purchases made under the FHTB scheme. These statistics are published quarterly and can be found on gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/forces-help-to-buy-scheme-quarterly-statistics-index
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