No, I don’t mean those who help themselves to State benefits they are not entitled to, be they (out of many examples I could choose) the males who work in our building trade or the women who pose as single parents because you are simply better off if you do not marry, or, even worse, do not work.

I mean those who leave school, or sixth form or university and start working. They should get all the help the State can offer. They should get all the carrots the State can sow to help them start leading independent lives, to build up their own home base, to be independent individuals and not mammoni who expect their wives to cosset them as their Maltese mums do or did.

The housing market may not be booming right now, but this may mean it is a good time to buy.

Sellers are interested in you. They are far less likely to gazump you than they were a year ago. They are a lot less arrogant than they were even six months ago when there was a take it or leave it attitude to purchasing a home. Of course you have to choose carefully. Our national mania for pricing homes in a totally individual way means there is no real consistency in pricing, which sometimes means the price asked is occasionally way off the mark. If you look carefully, if you don’t have too many preconceptions of what your starter home must be like (such as built in the last year and still swirling in our yellow stone dust), there are actually thousands of such homes available for less than Lm50,000.

One estate agent alone said they had around 1,500 properties on their books for less than that figure.

And there is quite a lot of help right now for those who want to start on the path of home ownership. There is the new scheme subsidy on the interest rate to slightly ease the burden, and particularly the potential burden of those who want to start on the property ladder. There is equity sharing when government can co-own a home with you and substantially reduce your monthly expenditure, saving you many hundreds of pounds a year. And of course there will be the issue of shared ownership flats shortly for those whose income may be lower, who may have less job security, who may have extra needs of one form or another.

One new client group that is starting to profit from home ownership are those young people who have had some experience of fostering, or spent some time in institutes, children in other words who have not had all the advantages of family life enjoyed by the vast majority of Maltese and Gozitans. Fifteen of them recently completed a two-year training programme that helped them obtain skills, find work and access housing. As a project it achieved a best practice award among the EU countries that participated, a great badge of honour for all the young people who were the ones who really made the project such a success. Now some of them want to buy under shared ownership, whether singly or together as friends; this kind of shared purchasing between friends is a trend that might become more common among young aspiring homeowners in the near future.

There are changes as well that will advantage those looking for work, who work, who contribute. We have to stop this culture where someone wants to buy a shared ownership flat and says their only income is social security, or relief. How can someone who just has enough money for living expenses also pay off a loan? Why do some of our banks still lend to such clients? Shouldn’t people have a job to qualify for a loan? Common sense dictates as much but as we know truth really is stranger than fiction in some areas on the Maltese home ownership front.

From now on though, those who work and earn will be advantaged if they want to benefit from subsidies, which are paid for by taxpayers after all; they will get the carrots they so deserve in a society that is heartily fed up of benefit abuse, be it on the work front or the false single parent front. It is not everybody of course but their numbers are too substantial, their nail extension lifestyle too comfortable to be ignored.

So those who help themselves and work will have a far better chance of being able to buy a shared ownership flat than those who do not. There are of course always the genuine exceptions. Young people who live on a disability allowance, who are being helped by their parents to live as independently as possible, should get on the property ladder too, a far cry from the days when we only imagined people with disabilities living in one form of institution or other.

Helping those who help themselves, in the positive sense of that expression should be the mantra of State intervention. The current help on offer to first time buyers is testimony to this. It is now up to young people to look for properties that are realistically priced and which make good starter homes. It may not be the dream home but starting is important. With the help on offer there should be less false starts than there might otherwise have been.

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