Money News
New figures from the British Bankers' Association give the starkest indication yet that the UK housing market is stalling - seasonally-adjusted mortgage approvals for house purchase falling 37.8% - year-on-year - to 42,088 in December. That's the third straight monthly fall and the worst performance since the BBA first started collecting data back in 1997.
Approvals for remortgaging rose slightly, however, and now account for 44% of all approvals as customers seek out alternative deals. Loans approved for equity withdrawal and other purposes continued to decline gently, though.
Meanwhile, underlying net mortgage lending rose by £4.7 billion last month - slightly stronger than the £4.6 billion seen in November - but significantly below the recent trend.
Elsewhere, annual growth in credit card borrowing rose slightly to 5.2%, but repayments continued to outstrip new spending as they had done for most of 2007. Transactions numbers in December were weaker than average.
Annual growth in loans and overdrafts rose slightly to 4.5%, having been near 10% at the start of the year. New unsecured lending was little changed in December.
The latest numbers come against an economic backdrop of British consumers running up record total debt of £1.4 trillion and a typical mortgage rate offered by lenders (on a 95% LTV) creeping up from 6.44% in November to 6.53% in December - the latter based on figures published by Bank of England published earlier this month.
24 January 2008 © Moneyextra.com
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