PM Boris Johnson vows to ‘vastly’ reduce mortgage deposits

The PM launches a defence of the private sector as he vows to “not go back to 2019, but to do better” after the COVID-19 crisis

Boris Johnson has dismissed the claims that COVID-19 has “robbed me of my mojo” as the PM announced promises for social care and green energy, as well as housing during his speech at the Conservative Party conference.

The Prime Minister, addressing the Conservative Party through a video stream to his fellow party’s members, launched an adamant defence of the private sector as he vowed to “build back better” from the coronavirus health crisis.

Declaring that he had “had more than enough of this disease”, the PM promised Conservative party members that the next time they would be meeting it would be “face to face and cheek by jowl”.

This comes after the UK’s benefits system is bracing for up to four million people becoming unemployed in the coming months, due to the economic fall-out of the COVID-19 crisis accelerating.

But Boris Johnson added it “isn’t enough to go back to normal” as the country had “lost too much” and “mourned too many”.

The Prime Minister predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would be a “trigger for an acceleration of social and economic change, because we human beings will not simply content ourselves with a repair job”.

“Of course this is self-evident drivel, the kind of seditious propaganda that you would expect from people who don’t want this government to succeed, who wanted to stop us delivering Brexit and all our other manifesto pledges,” he said.

The prime minister said: “We need now to take forward one of the key proposals of our manifesto of 2019: giving young, first-time buyers the chance to take out a long-term, fixed-rate mortgage of up to 95% of the value of the home – vastly reducing the size of the deposit and giving the chance of home ownership – and all the joy and pride that goes with it – to millions that feel excluded.”

“We believe that this policy could create two million more owner-occupiers – the biggest expansion of home ownership since the 1980s.”

“We will help turn generation rent into generation buy.”

“COVID has shone a spotlight on the difficulties of that sector in all parts of the UK – and to build back better we must respond, care for the carers as they care for us,” he added.

This comes after people might have been infected with COVID-19 as a result of nearly 16,000 positive coronavirus cases being missed from the government’s test and trace scheme, a cabinet minister has admitted.

In addition, Mr Johnson had confirmed to make the pledge that offshore wind power in the United Kingdom would be powering every home within the nation within the next 10 years.

“Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle – the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,” he said.

“As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind – a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without, the carbon emissions and without the damage to the environment.”