Housing initiatives will feature strongly in tomorrow's Budget, but further help for first-home buyers is unlikely.
Instead, the Government will focus on social housing and freeing up more land in Auckland for housing developments, ministers said yesterday.
Finance Minister Bill English said Welcome Home and HomeStart subsidies were already "heavily used" by first-home buyers.
"We're pretty happy with the progress of that scheme so there won't be any enhancements to that."
Nearly 12,000 people have taken advantage of the HomeStart subsidy in the year since it was introduced, though only 9 per cent of them have been in Auckland, where demand for houses is the greatest.
Mr English said first home-buyers would benefit from measures in the Budget that supported growth but nothing specific was planned for this demographic.
He reiterated that money alone would not solve Auckland's housing problems, which were primarily caused by restrictive planning rules.
The Government has indicated it will force the Auckland Council to change its urban growth limits if councillors refuse to do so.
These limits also affected the Government's attempts to expand social housing in collaboration with NGOs, Mr English said.
Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett said the social housing announcement in the Budget would show people how hard the Government had been working on the issue.
She dismissed a suggestion the Government was scrambling to address the problem, after recent media stories highlighting people living in cars and garages in Auckland.
"No, I have been working on this policy since I became a minister, so it's been 18 months."
The increasing unaffordability of housing in Auckland has led Opposition parties to reiterate calls for a state-sponsored building programme.
Labour leader Andrew Little said Labour's policy was to drive a huge building programme through Government.