Yesterday the Nationwide Building Society revealed a cooling in the annual rate of UK house price growth. Now the Bank of England has said that, in April, mortgage lending rose at its slowest pace since the height of the 2012 eurozone crisis.
The Times reports that the slow crawl followed a significant increase in lending a month earlier when landlords rushed to buy homes before a stamp duty rise came into effect on April 1. According to the Bank of England, net mortgage lending in April rose by £281 million, a fraction of the £7.4 billion increase seen in March and more than 13 times less than the £3.8 billion rise forecast by economists.
Such a low increase in net lending has not been recorded in Britain since August 2012 and demonstrates the impact that the extra 3 per cent stamp duty tax had on the housing market.
Motor insurance too complicated
Half of the UK’s drivers believe that motor insurance is too confusing, with the overwhelming majority (86 per cent) believing that it needs to be easier to understand. Research from Co-op Insurance has found that over half don’t understand how their premium is calculated, two fifths are unclear why their premium price may fluctuate year to year and over a third don’t understand their policy price, in relation to their vehicle.
Research has also revealed that many people aren’t aware of some of the fundamental things that their premium is for. For example, 42 per cent of drivers don’t realise it is in case another driver claims for personal injury as a result of an accident that is their fault. For two fifths of drivers, motor insurance is a grudge purchase, with over one in ten of drivers saying that they would not buy motor insurance if it wasn’t a legal requirement.
Peer-to-peer lending
Andrew Tyrie MP, chairman of the Treasury Committee, has written to Tracey McDermott, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and Andrew Bailey, deputy governor of the Bank of England for Prudential Regulation, about whether consumers would benefit from further regulation of the peer-to-peer lending market.
Commenting on the correspondence, Tyrie said: ‘The committee is concerned to ensure that the FCA is paying due attention to the risks – and the opportunities – afforded by the growth of peer-to-peer lending and related markets. With this is mind, I have written today to Tracey McDermott to ask for an explanation of FCA policy.
‘Government policy – letting peer-to-peer investments form part of an ISA allowance, for instance – represents a form of official support for investments that may be inherently higher risk. Peer-to-peer loans are estimated to have totalled £4.4 billion in the final quarter of 2015 – up from close to zero five years ago.”
Help for first-time buyers
Skipton Building Society and its intermediary lending arm, Skipton Intermediaries, has removed its maximum loan size cap for first-time buyers in a move it says will support one of the first rungs on the UK’s property ladder.
The building society says that the decision will be of particular benefit to the London and South housing markets where first-time buyers with good jobs and deposits struggle to meet lenders’ affordability criteria. With average monthly rent payments in London estimated at £1,500, removing the maximum loan size cap will enable many more to get on the housing ladder, Skipton believes.
More fallout from the Panama PapersGeorge Osborne and ministers from the UK’s extensive network of tax havens are among key witnesses that MEPs intend to call as part of a major inquiry set to be launched into the Panama Papers. The Guardian reports that leaders of the European parliament meet in Brussels today to approve the creation of an influential 65-member ‘inquiry committee’, which is expected to target the tax avoidance industry.
According to draft documents, the committee will have a mandate to investigate ‘alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application of Union law in relation to money laundering, tax avoidance and evasion’.
And finally…
According to The Telegraph, the glory days of boozy business lunches are long gone because of the time restraints and financial pressures placed on British workers.
Nearly half of all British workers are too busy to even leave their desks for lunch – so says restaurant reservation service Bookatable. Its study found that the traditional business lunch has been in steady decline since its heyday in the 1980s, despite 40 per cent of British workers saying lunch with prospective clients is the most important factor in sealing a business deal.
‘Nothing prepared me,’ said Baroness Amos as she released her ‘reflections and initial impressions’ about England’s maternity and neonatal services, ‘for the scale of unacceptable care that women and families have received, and continue to receive, the tragic consequences for their babies, and the impact on their mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.’ Amos’s words today
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