They own land! Give them money!

The Lib Dems step up to the Home-Owner-Ist plate. From the BBC:

Homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages amid rising interest rates should be able to apply for a £300-a-month grant, the Lib Dems have said.

Under plans, the grant would open to people whose mortgage payments had risen by more than 10% of their income. It could be paid for by reversing tax cuts for banks, the party has said…

It would be far easier – can you imagine the form filling involved in proving that your payments have increased by more than 10% of your income, for example? What compared to what? – just to cap mortgage interest rates. Just declare that all interest rates to be fixed at whatever people rate were paying when they took out the mortgage.

Any price cap on a quasi-monopoly like a bank has much the same effect as a tax on their monopoly profits/rental income and saves a lot of churn. To level the playing field (morgage-borrowers vs tenants), they could do normal rent controls. This is quite different to price caps in the truly competitive private sector, which usually make matters worse.