Imagine - if you are not one of the several million people who falls into this category - that you are a frustrated first-time homebuyer.

Over the past few years you have resisted the temptation to borrow six times your salary to buy a dingy one-bedroomed flat. Neither have you got together with a distant friend, or a stranger plucked off the internet, and bought a share of slightly brighter two-bedroomed flat. You would still like to own a home, but are happy to rent as you bide your time.

You should listen out carefully this morning, because the Prime Minister has a plan to revitalise the housing market - and he says it is for your benefit. According to the advance billing, this will revolve around a large expansion in shared-equity housing, where you buy half of a house and the Government buys the other half.

Mr Brown also wants to try to arrest the slump in house prices by giving councils money to buy up homes under the threat of repossession and to underwrite billions of pounds of mortgage loans. Another plan that was floated earlier in the year would have given buyers of properties worth less than £250,000 a stamp-duty holiday, saving a levy of 1percent on the house's value. Try as you might, you could have a problem working out how any of these measures will benefit you. The problem of unaffordability in the housing market is rapidly being solved without government intervention.

According to the Nationwide Building Society, house prices have fallen by 10.5 per cent in a year. Why then, would you want to invest in half a house now when, if you wait for a year or two, you will be able to afford the whole house?

Moreover, why should you want your taxes used to bail out feckless homeowners who borrowed too much during the boom and, worse still, the greedy banks that lent it to them?

Even the stamp-duty holiday would have been only a temporary reprieve. Who wants to buy now and save 1per cent in tax when house prices possibly still have a further 30 per cent to fall?

None of the measures announced today will genuinely be in the interests of first-time buyers - it just sounds better if they are promoted in that way. In reality, they are a crude attempt to buy the votes of those who already own property and are feeling a little sick at the diminishing value of their investments.

Pour a bit of public money into the housing market, Mr Brown figures, and it might just be possible to re-create the glory days of the 1997-2007 property boom, when voters felt a warm glow from effortless wealth creation and began to believe his propaganda that he had put an end to boom and bust.

The moral hazard of bailing out the housing market is serious enough - by protecting borrowers and lenders from the consequences of their actions, the Government will simply be encouraging even more reckless behaviour in the next housing boom. But perhaps we should not be overly bothered about this, as any attempt to buck the housing market will be doomed to failure - just like the Tory Government's efforts in the early 1990s to buck the currency market under the exchange-rate mechanism.

The Government first tried to underpin the housing market in April when it swapped £50 billion worth of government bonds for mortgage-backed securities. The result? The banks said thanks very much but carried on as they were doing before - tightening lending criteria and raising mortgage rates.

The Bank of England's figures for July show just how seriously mortgage lending has collapsed - and demonstrate just how much the Government would have to spend to re-create the boom. In July 2007, lenders advanced a total of £17.2billion to homebuyers. In July 2008 they advanced only £4.3billion.

If the Government was going to step in and make up the weight of money that has been lost from the property market it would have to double income tax or close the National Health Service.

In any case, who really wants a return to the days of mass council-owned housing? When property prices were rising rapidly the Government did much to encourage the sale of council housing stock - the number of council-owned homes has fallen from 6.1 million in 1997 to 2.5 million today.

It did so for the same reason that the Tories sold council homes in the 1980s and 1990s - home ownership encourages self-reliance and diminishes the number of social ghettos. To force taxpayers to rebuild a stock of council homes now in a falling market is not just perverse; it would also rank alongside Gordon Brown's sale of gold reserves at the bottom of the gold market in 1999 as one of the most crass cases of public investment ever.

There are few problems so bad that a government cannot make them ten times worse by intervening. The housing market is no exception. Much as it will cause pain to those who bought too late into the dream of home ownership, the only sensible policy is to stand back and let the market find its own level.

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