BRITAIN - The British housing slump seems set to worsen after official figures revealed yesterday that mortgage lending dived by nearly 70 per cent in October.
The Bank of England's latest report on the mortgage market revealed net lending on homes, which strips out redemptions and repayments, reached459 million ($1.29 billion) in the month, the second lowest figure recorded by the central bank since it began to collect data in this format in 1993.
At 32,000, the number of new mortgages was also at a low, down on the 33,000 seen in September, and a disastrous showing when set against the 72,000 a month they were running at, at the end of 2007.
Just 460,000 mortgages have been approved this year, compared with 1,098,000 over the same period in 2007. The credit crunch has long choked off the supply of lending to the market, and there is now increasing evidence the falls in house prices recently seen, running at about a 15 per cent annual rate of decline, are depressing demand for mortgages.
The Bank of England figures also showed an increase in unsecured borrowing, with lending through credit cards, overdrafts and loans rising by 844 million in October, up from the previous month's very weak increase of 345 million.
But the figure was still less than half the 1.79 billion borrowed in October 2007.
