Mortgage professionals say first-time buyers, landlords and the wider market were left out in the cold as the chancellor sidestepped key decisions
The chancellor’s long-anticipated Budget arrived with a promise to steady markets and calm nerves. Instead, mortgage brokers say it managed something quite different: it left an entire sector wondering why housing policy appeared to fall off the Treasury’s agenda altogether.
Michelle Niziol, founder of IMS Property Group, captured the immediate sentiment. “You can’t tax your way to growth,” she said, arguing that investment only thrives when “confidence, clarity and stability” are present, qualities she felt the Budget “doesn’t offer enough of.” Without restored confidence, she warned, “growth won’t follow.”
For mortgage professionals, the silence on first-time buyers was especially jarring. Niziol noted that there was “nothing here” for them - “no deposit support, no Stamp Duty reform, no boost for affordability” - leaving younger households facing “higher taxes, higher rents and higher borrowing costs with no targeted support at all.” The moment, she said, had been ripe for a “big opportunity to support mortgage innovation,” from long-term fixes to refinancing help, “and instead we got silence.”
Gaurav Shukla, CEO of Home Me Mortgages, said that while the Budget “wasn’t a bad” one on paper, the property sector “feels like a clear missed opportunity.” Beyond the new tax on homes worth over £2 million - a measure he noted affects “a very specific part of the market” - he said “for the majority of buyers, especially first-time buyers, there was nothing of substance.”
Shukla expects brokers to be “talking about what wasn’t announced just as much as what was,” given that a fragile market depends heavily on sentiment. The statement “didn’t do any harm,” he said, but “certainly didn’t move the needle for most borrowers.”
If the Budget was meant to avoid surprises, it may have succeeded too well.
For landlords, however, the direction of travel remains unmistakably painful. Carolyn Dunion, a Scotland-based director at McKendry Dunion, said it “looks like income tax for landlords is rising,” a move she called “sheer madness” amid a nationwide housing shortage. Many landlords, whom she described as “ordinary people” seeking a modest investment beyond their pension, have been “repeatedly targeted to the point that being a small level property investor is not only unprofitable but is a real risk.”
The result, she said, is visible on the ground: landlords leaving the sector, “short supply,” and “higher rents,” which she characterised simply as “basic economics.” A shift away from individual landlords might have been defensible, she said, “if they had invested in social housing and were able to provide an alternative. They haven't. So what now?”
Steven Barber, managing owner at Bridging Financial Solutions, set out the fiscal consequences bluntly. From 2027, “rates of income tax from property income will increase by two percentage points,” he said, noting that the OBR expects the change to “hit landlords in the pocket and force rents up.” Barber calculates that typical rents will rise by £20–£25 per month as landlords attempt to absorb the burden, adding that the measure sits within a “successive assault on the Private Rental Sector” that risks deepening shortages and intensifying cost-of-living pressures.
After a year defined by speculation about fresh buyer support or measures to improve affordability, brokers say the Budget has left them with clarity of a different sort: the government is not willing to intervene. There were no new schemes, no targeted affordability levers, and no meaningful attempt to address supply.
The result is a market direction set not by policy but by omission. As Shukla put it, the industry “needed clarity and confidence.” The Budget delivered neither, and it is the silence that is now echoing loudest.
