The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says the government is losing momentum in tackling child poverty, with little progress in the past three years and one in three UK children still living in poverty. A treasury select committee said Tony Blair’s 1999 pledge to halve child poverty by 2010 is in doubt. Homes built on flood plains
House prices have recorded their largest monthly fall since 1992, says Nationwide building society. Prices fell 2.5 per cent during May according to its latest monthly survey, bringing the year on year figure down 4.4 per cent. Nationwide said that it was the seventh consecutive month of falling prices, and price falls were now accelerating.
Chancellor Alistair Darling has unveiled plans to convert Northern Rock’s £25 billion Bank of England loan into bonds before selling them to investors. The bonds would be guaranteed by the government until a private buyer is found, in a bid to avoid full public ownership. The scheme is supported by Goldman Sachs, and potential buyers
Commenting in the Evening Standard, Shelter chief executive Adam Sampson warns that homes in London costing less than £100,000 could soon be a thing of the past. An increasingly detached underclass are the real victims of our dysfunctional housing market argues the author Mark Braund in today’s Guardian. Making affordable housing a central part of
Struggling homeowners in Wales are to be given a financial lifeline. An extra £5 million has been transferred to the Welsh Assembly’s mortgage rescue scheme in a bid to stop homeowners who face repossession from being made homeless. The target of ending homelessness by 2012 in Scotland might not be achieved across all of Scotland,
The Halifax has released its house price index for December which shows that prices went up by 1.3 per cent, the first rise in the past four months. The overall annual rise was 5.2 per cent, the slowest annual rate of growth since 1996, taking the average UK home to £197,039 in 2007. The lender
Previews of the Freud report on Welfare reform – due later this month – appear in several of today’s papers. The Mail predicts that people who are long-term unemployed and refuse to look for work will have their benefits stopped, while Peter Riddell in the Times focuses on plans to introduce work tests for lone
The centrepiece of yesterday’s housing industry rescue package – the stamp duty holiday – has come under fire today. Referred to as a ‘sticking plaster’ by many, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said it will have little impact in London, where a first-time buyer’s property averages at around £260,000. As many as nine out
The chancellor Alistair Darling has urged mortgage lenders to pass the recent interest rate cuts on to homeowners, saying it was time lenders ‘played their part’ after the Bank of England injected £15 billion into the financial system. After conceding on Friday that the present financial troubles are the ‘biggest economic shock since the Great
The Bank of England announced yesterday that it would provide £10 billion in emergency funds to the UK’s commercial banks in an attempt to prevent a worsening of the credit crunch over the Christmas period. Bank governor Mervyn King said current fragility meant further action might be needed in coming weeks, and he forecast a