THE number of Winchester families to be helped onto the housing ladder by the Government's Help to Buy scheme is just a fraction of others across Hampshire.

Figures released last week show just 53 sales went through in Winchester under the flagship mortgage scheme - compared to much higher sales elsewhere in the county.

Across Winchester district there are 58,980 people aged between 20-59 - the prime age for mortgage applications - and yet, in the Test Valley, where there are 59,173 of the same age, 325 houses were sold in the Romsey, Southampton North and Southampton Test constituencies.

The project has helped 100,000 home owners nationally - the equivalent of 131 households a day - enabling them to snap up a mortgage with a five per cent deposit.

But a local estate agent has said the figures for Winchester indicate that the city is simply too expensive for those getting onto the ladder for the first time.

John Leeson, managing director of Belgarum Estate Agents, said: "I guess the reason it is so limited is because Winchester is very expensive and a lot of Winchester is made up fairly affluent areas, for affluent people to buy, and there seems to be extra help from the bank of mum and dad.

"You see a lot of parents with equity in their own property or savings and they want to help their children get on the ladder and that's a lot of what we see. There's also been a lot less building in Winchester, less development, I think would be fair to say."

As reported last year, house prices in Winchester have risen by more than a fifth since the financial crisis, according to website Rightmove. The average asking price for a house last August was £446,421 - a rise of 21 per cent since the pre-crash peak in May 2008 and a stark contrast the the country's average of 4.2 per cent.

Under the new scheme 272 houses were sold in Basingstoke, and 265 were sold in Eastleigh. In Portsmouth the figures showed 258 sales and 202 for Southampton.