With respect to everyone who has offered their advice, they appear to have done so without a full understanding of your personal circumstances, your ambitions, your tolerance to risk etc etc - IMO the best advice would be to talk to an IFA.
Or maybe we reset our national loathing of renting, make sure there is a well regulated rental sector with rent restrictions and reconsider our obsession with our homes as assets which would, in a heartbeat, reduce house prices. Much of what I see here is people bemoaning someone's ability to...
In fairness, I had the a similar reaction to Worthinglite, it struck me as odd that you would talk about the 'rental trap' having mentioned a BTL mortgage. FWIW, it's symptomatic of our relationship with housing that we refer to things like 'rental traps' and 'property ladders', 'homes' as...