Help To Buy ISA bonus question

Caz48

First time posting here, but really hoping someone has an answer for us as we're very confused!!

My fiance and I have just completed on the purchase of our first house. It's a new-build and as we were a little naive, we simply went with the mortgage broker and solicitors recommended by the developer.

We both had Help To Buy ISAs and between us we'd saved just over £18k. The purchase price of the house was £186,995 so we could have put a 10% deposit down if we'd wanted. However, as we thought we'd have furniture etc. to buy we decided to use the Government Help to Buy Scheme (where they loan you 20% of the value of the house), put a 5% deposit down and retain any savings left over to buy things for the house.

We put down the £9,349.75 deposit so were expecting a bonus of around £2,300 at completion. The solicitor, mortgage broker and the lender ALL knew we were using Help To Buy ISAs to fund our deposit - we even asked our solicitors when they needed the closing letters for our ISAs and they told us not to worry and they would ask us for them when they were needed.

Fast forward 5 months and we finally complete on the house, we've never been asked for the statements and no sign of the bonus.

A call to the solicitors yesterday yielded the response that as our mortgage and government borrowing covered the completion funds for the house, we aren't eligible for the bonus!

It does seem like someone has messed up here and we're at a loss to know who! Should our mortgage advisor have factored the bonus in and applied to the lender for a smaller mortgage at the outset??

Any help/advice would be appreciated as we do want to take this further but we need to know exactly who the problem lies with before we do!

Thanks!:)

eskbanker

During discussions about funding the purchase, you should have agreed some sort of schedule with all three parties listing each source of funds, totalling the agreed purchase price, which should have included HTB equity loan, the other mortgage, the HTB ISA balance and the HTB ISA bonus.

However, if the solicitor specifically committed (was this in writing?) to asking you for the HTB ISA closing documentation and failed to do so then I'd say you have some sort of claim against them.

Regarding "We put down the £9,349.75 deposit so were expecting a bonus of around £2,300 at completion", I'm not quite sure how this reconciles with the £18K balance? Too late now I know, but what should have happened was that you'd have notified the HTB ISA provider that you were closing the accounts and then passing the closing documents to the solicitor, who'd then secure a 25% bonus (£4,500) of the closing balances immediately before completion.