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IN PICTURES AND VIDEO: Prime Minister hails Help to Buy as he tours Cannock estate

Prime Minister, David Cameron was in Cannock today, saying how he wants to help people buy their own homes.

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The Prime Minister visited the Bellway Homes housing development in Cannock, which has seen a third of its homes sold under Help to Buy.

In his visit to Cannock, the Prime Minister also met the Express & Star's political editor, Daniel Wainwright, and spoke of his 'fury' over claims Stafford Hospital will close.

The couple and their daughter, Freya, moved into a three-bedroom house on Cannock's Lakeside development with a loan under the Help to Buy scheme.

They had been in a two-bedroom house but wanted more space when their daughter came along in July 2013. Buying the £179,995 new-build house a year later without Help to Buy would have cost them an additional £500 a month compared with their old home. An equity loan, however, has cut that down to £50.

Mr and Mrs Willis, who feature in the Help to Buy promotional video, are what get called 'second steppers' by the mortgage industry – people who are looking for their second home. According to Lloyds Bank, around 46 per cent of such people find the costs of moving the biggest barrier.

Mr Willis, a 35-year-old senior re-ablement officer for Walsall Council, said: "Our old place was starting to feel a little cramped and our cat Rocky kept getting too close to the fish tank."

Help to Buy offers people an equity loan worth up to 20 per cent of the purchase price of a new property. Buyers need to find the other 80 per cent themselves via a mortgage. Lenders usually want the buyer to put in at least five per cent as a deposit.

The equity loan has to be repaid after 25 years or earlier if the person sells their home. It means if they received an equity loan for 20 per cent of the purchase price, they have to repay 20 per cent of the proceeds of the sale.

Before the visit David Cameron wrote an exclusive piece for the Express & Star about the effects of Help to Buy in the West Midlands.

"It's nearly five years since we came to office. When we did, times were bleak for families here in the West Midlands.

Too many businesses had rolled down their shutters for good. Hardworking staff had been let go. Taxes were taking their toll on family budgets.

And families desperate to get on or move up the property ladder – people with good jobs, with enough to pay a mortgage – were simply unable to get together the large sums needed for a deposit.

Over the past five years we've been putting those wrongs right. We've turned the high unemployment into a jobs revolution. An amazing 127,000 new jobs have been created here in the West Midlands. We've got a record number of businesses: 55,000 more in this region than in 2010. And 2.2 million people here have more money as a result of our income tax cuts.

Something else has been changing people's lives as well: a scheme called Help to Buy. Thanks to this scheme, which helps people with their deposits for a new home, 77,000 people across Britain have been able to step onto or move up the property ladder – people like Laura and Jonathan Willis from Cannock. Without Help to Buy, they said it would have been five or six years before they could have even considered moving. But today they're in their new house, with more space for their daughter to play and the bigger garden they dreamed of.

Why does this matter? Because as Conservatives we believe hard work should be rewarded – and there's no better reward than being able to put down roots. We're the ones that drove the property-owning democracy, who gave people the right to buy their council houses. Today, we remain the party of home ownership – and on Help to Buy we've proved the critics wrong.

People said it would just help those in London, but over 90 per cent of buyers live outside the capital. They said it would help people with houses already, but four-fifths are first-time buyers. They said it would cause a housing bubble, but it hasn't. What is has done is give people like Laura and Jonathan the chance to get on in life."

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