Help to Buy requires tweaking but the UK needs it The excesses of the past have been scrapped and, as the Council of Mortgage Lenders said on Wednesday, suggestions of an incipient boom are premature. In many ways the market is dysfunctional. First-time buyers have to save 10pc deposits to get on the property ladder, making it easier for landlords to outmuscle them, condemning more to "Generation Rent." In that respect, Help to Buy is a good policy. Like Funding for Lending, or the myriad banking schemes devised in the financial crisis, it is meant to fix a market failure. By getting housing transaction levels up, Mr Osborne is convinced he can stimulate building, too - giving the economy a shot in the arm at the same time as addressing Britain's housing shortfall. All well and good but caution is required. If the market is beginning to fix itself, Help to Buy would merely overstimulate demand, which would inevitably push up prices. So why not introduce some "knock-outs" that automatically shut the scheme down if a bubble starts building? The Chancellor has suggested house prices should "rise broadly in line with long-term average rate-of-earnings growth," so the scheme could be linked to such a target, or to a new home build measure. Moreover, it need not be available for £600,000 properties. There is time to adjust Help to Buy because the controversial element only comes into effect in January and has yet to be set out in detail. Help to Buy is a viable recovery tool and the Chancellor should persevere with it, providing he builds in the appropriate safety mechanisms. More capital is not the answer for all banks This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Over the coming weeks attention will also turn to the anniversaries of home-grown calamities, especially the failure of HBOS and the bail-out of Royal Bank of Scotland, and how to prevent a repeat performance. For international regulators, the watchword is capital. The more banks are stuffed with loss-bearing funds by their shareholders and, increasingly, bondholders, the safer they will be. Low levels of capital contributed to the loss of confidence in the banking system in 2008 as markets became wary of banks that were thought to be poorly capitalised. But more capital is not an end in itself. This approach overlooks two of the most significant factors that determined the banks" fate during the crisis - their management and business model. Dick Fuld, Andy Hornby and Fred Goodwin were three very different chief executives, running three very different banks, Lehman Brothers, HBOS and RBS, but each shared similar flaws - insufficient checks on their executive power; an inability to identify and manage significant risks; rewarding staff for the quantity rather than the quality of their business. Their faults were not unique but a combination of all three left their banks exceptionally vulnerable when crisis struck. Determining the right leader for a major financial institution and a safe business model is harder than simply ordering a bank to raise more capital. It should be remembered that three years before the crisis struck, Morgan Stanley investors threw out their relatively risk-averse chief, Philip Purcell, and pushed the US investment bank to copy the highly-leveraged bets of its Wall Street rivals. Pumping risky banks full of more capital will not make them less risky. Similarly, putting in place leverage ratios that do not differentiate risks could incentivise banks towards more exotic money-making ventures. The lesson is that there is no one-size fits all approach: no amount of capital will save the incompetent, while prudent risk takers should be able to get by with far less. BBC view raises question about licence fee There is no doubt that BSkyB benefits from the BBC's unmatched spending on television programming. Its product would be greatly diminished if viewers were forced to switch to a Freeview box or another platform to watch Strictly Come Dancing, The Great British Bake Off or any of the other most popular BBC shows. So it appears perverse that, for all its strategic success and growing profits, BSkyB demands that the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters should pay it for carrying such valuable content. It is even stranger that the company is willing to dig its heels in over a mere £10m per year, though it is typical of BSkyB's aggressive approach to commercial negotiations. It wants certain things from the BBC, such as an agreement to let it distribute programming to smartphones on demand via its Sky Go smartphone app, which is a keystone of the company's future growth plans. BSkyB knows that by quibbling over £10m, of which only £5m comes from the BBC, at a time when the national broadcaster's finances are under pressure and public scrutiny, it strengthens its hand. Along with its terrestrial broadcasting peers, the BBC believes that BSkyB and other pay-TV platforms should be paying it for its content. It is a perfectly rational argument but it does raise an important question: if the BBC is able to exploit its content commercially should it continue to rely so heavily on the largesse of licence fee payers?