My partner and I are in our late 20s. We earn good salaries and our joint income is a respectable £60,000 per annum. I am a teacher and, therefore, a key worker, which the mayor says should get priority in these housing schemes.

We currently rent a one-bedroom flat, but have dreams of buying our own place. We have a deposit of around £15,000, which in London doesn’t get us very far, but we could get a very small one-bed flat at the low end of the market.

For us, an obvious choice is to go with the shared ownership scheme set up by the Government and Mayor of London for the sole purpose of helping first-time buyers with a small deposit get themselves onto the property ladder by buying a share of a property and renting the rest.

On paper it seems obvious to do this. On paper it seems easy. Sadly, in Barnet, that is just not the case.

There are only a few properties available as part of this scheme in the borough, so there are limited options.

One option is Kingsgate in Finchley, where only six shared ownership flats are available at what can only be described as a soul-destroying cost. The cheapest two-bed flat is a market value of £440,000.

They want you to buy a 40 per cent share meaning you need a whopping deposit of at least £18,000 and monthly repayments of £1,600, not including ground rent and bills.

They recommend an income of at least £58,000. We earn slightly above that and not in a million years could we afford that on top of living expenses like buying food to eat or furniture to sit on in our new home.

Beck Place in North Finchley has taken nearly two years to do very little and won’t be ready until at least summer 2015. Rumours are that they too will have a market value of around £400,000. So looks like those will be out of our price range too.

What are we meant to do when the Government scheme set up to help first-time buyers is pushing us out and making it even more impossible to take that stepping stone onto the property ladder?

It seems more and more that Barnet is pushing young people out and only adding fuel to the fire that London is only a place for the wealthy.

Francesca Taubman

Church Lane, East Finchley