Vince Cable has questioned whether the mortgage indemnity scheme, which the government plans to launch in January 2014 to encourage higher loan-ti-velue lending, is necessary.

Halifax, the country’s largest mortgage lender, recently released figures revealing that existing government schemes have promted the biggest increase in property prices since 2010.

The first phase of Help to Buy, an equity loan scheme, introduced in April this year, and the Funding for Lending scheme, available since last August, are widely credited with bringing about the recent renaissance in the housing market.

The second part of Help to Buy (sometimes referred to as Help to Buy 2), a mortgage indemnity scheme which offers to insure part of higher loan-to-value mortgages, is planned for next January. Its aim is to encourage more lenders to lend at lower interest rates to borrowers with smaller deposits.

Vince Cable has now suggested the government rethink whether it wants the second phase of the scheme to go ahead.

“The controversy is over the second part of the scheme, which is a guarantee scheme that does not take effect until the new year,” he told Sky News.

“Obviously the government is going to have to look at that in the light of the way the market is developing.”

The Liberal Democrat was then questioned whether the second half of the scheme should be cancelled or altered and said:

“We should certainly think about how it should come into effect, whether indeed it should come into effect, in the light of changing market conditions. “We don’t want a new housing bubble.”

Earlier this week Chancellor George Osborne issued a vigorous defence of Help to Buy, one of his flagship policies.

He said high LTV mortgages were not ‘exotic weapons of financial mass destruction’ and that government intervention was still needed.

However, Cable said there were now large parts of the country which had no need for a mortgage guarantee scheme and that its implementation could cause prices to spike.

“There are people out there, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors yesterday were warning this was a real risk. I think in many parts of the country it clearly isn’t a problem.

“If you are in Northern Ireland or Wales or indeed the East Midlands you would wonder what all this is about. But certainly in London and the south east, in the north east of Scotland, in other areas, there are serious housing inflationary pressures.”