Alistair Darling announced details of the pre-budget report yesterday. Besides increasing pension credit, income support and jobseeker’s allowance, a number of measures were specified to help homeowners. The recently announced £200 million mortgage rescue scheme where the government buys a home and then rents it back to the former owners, which will help up to
The department for Communities and Local Government yesterday released its land use change statistics for England for 2007. The report looks at previously developed land (either brownfield or created through building conversion), greenbelt, and areas of high flood risk. The 2004 Spending Review laid down that 60 per cent of new housing development should be
Repossessions in 2008 are set to rise by 50 per cent according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyor (RICS). Properties sold at auction numbered 7,732 last year, a rise of 15 per cent, while the number of repossessed properties rose by around 20 per cent. This is close to historically high levels and a
Borrowers with interest-only mortgages could be faced with crippling debts and negative equity in the falling property market, according to new research. Figures from insurer LV show about 41 per cent of homeowners with such loans – about 530,000, owing £30 billion – gambled on rising property values and cashing in equity to pay off
Housing minister Margaret Beckett said yesterday that the lifting of restrictions on councils to borrow private sector money would help fund social housing programmes. She is believed to have asked the Treasury to let councils have more financial freedom, allowing them to borrow freely on the open market. She added that some restrictions were already
According to the Council for Mortgage Lenders, mortgage lending fell during the first quarter of 2008 to its lowest level for more than three decades. From January to March, new mortgages slumped to 142,000, below the 146,000 recorded in early 1992 when Britain was in recession. Remortgaging has remained ‘resilient’, actually increasing in the first
Senior Bank of England official David Blanchflower warned yesterday that house prices could fall by 30 per cent over the next few years. But despite claims that up to £1,000 a week could be wiped from their value of each property, he argued that the drop would be sustainable. He added that ‘aggressive action’ was
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned the Bank of England (BoE) needed to press ahead with interest rate cuts, as the treasury is running out of options to produce further tax or spending boosts to help the ailing British economy. Britain has been identified as being among several economies that look particularly
A report from Citizens Advice detailing the financial, emotional and physical impact of poverty for children has said that Britain’s poorest families are ‘cold and hungry’ and often living in inadequate housing. One in three children live in poverty in the UK and this figure is rising again. Citizens Advice has called for the government
The gap between rich and poor in the UK has decreased ‘remarkably’ since 2000, a survey by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found. However, while ‘the poor have been getting richer more rapidly than the rich’ the UK still had one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed