IT is easy to imagine the mounting despair of potential first-time house buyers as successive housing cost surveys plot the inexorable rise of Island property prices.

With the average price paid for a three-bedroom home having soared to over £500,000 in the first quarter of this year, that first step on the housing ladder must, for a great many, be a very distant prospect indeed.

Limitations on supply and, for the foreseeable future at least, high levels of demand, characterise the Jersey market. First-time buyers are, therefore, principally the victims of the harsh laws of economics rather than anything to do with the shape of Island society or the course that Island politics have taken.

That said, the cost and supply of housing are political issues as well as facts of economic life and it is incumbent on our political representatives to try to solve the present problems, difficult as that task might be.

Against this background, the proposed Jersey Homebuy scheme, devised and now being actively promoted by Environment Minister Freddie Cohen, will offer new hope to the many Islanders still eager to own a home of their own.

The proposed scheme, which has already won the approval of Housing Minister Terry Le Main, is also the fulfilment of a promise made by Senator Cohen when he stood for election to the States.

It would, of course, be naïve to imagine that Senator Cohen’s initiative will do very much to shift the balance of the forces which define the fundamental nature of the Jersey housing market. That, however, is no reason to resist or criticise what is now on the table. Providing affordable homes for those who, in the absence of shared equity provisions, would have little hope of finding such a thing will in itself be a significant step forward.

If there is a flaw in the Senator’s idea, it relates not to the mechanics of the scheme but to its likely popularity. With so many people desperately eager to own rather than rent, there will undoubtedly be a massive surge of applicants determined to add their names to the Homebuy waiting list.