How to get on the housing ladder:

For example, the homebuyer raises the cash to buy 50% of the property and then pays rent on the remaining 50%. The benefits of shared ownership schemes are:

• For many this is the only way to achieve home-ownership
• You can buy a share as low as 25% or as high as 75% at the outset

…

Help for the elderly in mortgage trap:

Under the deal customers were able to borrow around a quarter of the value of their property.

But when they sell they must also pay back 75% of the increase in value, leaving many unable to buy a new home.

…

Well, if you only buy 25% of your house, you will only get 25% of the value when you sell it. Sounds quite fair to me.

So, in conclusion, the BBC thinks banks are evil for offering shared ownership schemes, and at the same time thinks they are a good idea. So that's clear then.

The difference between sensationalism and raising a serious issue is this: sensationalism is where you state your story using the worst case interpretation of the statistics, without explaining this to the reader — or just plain misinterpretation. Serious discussion of a real issue is where you quote statistics that show there is a problem even under conservative assumptions.

So it is disappointing to see the usually excellent Motley Fool veering into sensationalism with its articles on consumer credit. So what if consumer credit has quadrupled in 12 years? — that tells us nothing without allowing for inflation and economic growth.

Their starting figure for 1993, 53 billion pounds, is about 8.3% of 1993's GDP. Their estimated figure for 2005 is 193 billion pounds, about 16.2% of estimated current GDP. So it would be entirely sensible to say that consumer debt had doubled; and that is enough to say it's a growing problem. Saying that it has quadrupled, OTOH, is misleading, and is exactly the sort of thing that gives statistics a bad name.