The support for and promotion of home ownership has been a continuing theme in the UK since early in the 20th century. Specifically, with respect to partial equity products, these have had a role in national housing policy in the UK since 1980 when shared ownership (SO) models were first introduced. Since that time there has been a whole range of government and private initiatives but few have really achieved scale even though there was considerable enthusiasm not just from the government but also from the Bank of England and some market players.

What has worked well at least to some extent has been the range of shared equity schemes over the last decade or so with government, builders, and mortgage lenders taking part (eg, First Buy, Home Buy, and Open Market Homebuy but also some short term developer-led and lender led market products) and to a lesser degree Rent Plus type schemes where part owners pay a higher rent to support the incremental purchase. The largest equity scheme by far has been the Help to Buy (HtB) equity loan (launched in 2013) which has mixed traditional mortgage funding with equity loans to reduce deposits, repayments, and risk. From inception to the end of March 2020 some 272,852 equity loans with a value of £16.05 billion had been advanced in England (plus roughly 10,000 in each of Scotland and Wales up to the end of 2019). Importantly it was not defined as an affordable home ownership product but rather as a way of helping the market to recover from the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC).