Lunchtime news Tuesday 5 February 2024

Housing crisis, what crisis? It appears that Britons are sitting on nearly £2 trillion worth of equity in their homes. One in four households own their homes outright, amounting to £1.4 trillion, and a further one in three is paying off a home loan but still sitting on £580 billion in equity. Overall households have an average of £127,455 invested in bricks and mortar.

Housing minister, Caroline Flint, is expected today to announce that council tenants who do not work should seek employment or face losing their homes. In an interview with the Guardian Ms Flint indicated that new applicants for social housing would have to sign ‘commitment contracts’ that will eventually be extended to existing tenants. She said also that tenants who moved to take a job would be given priority in finding a home. Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps said Ms Flint was trying to ‘grab the headlines’ with proposals that could not be legally enforced.

Halifax has released its house price index for January, showing that prices were unchanged from the previous month, and the three-month trend was down 1 per cent. The annual rate of house price inflation is at 4.5 per cent, keeping the average price for a house just under £200,000. The bank says that it expects the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, meeting later this week, to cut interest rates in support of the housing market, as Halifax sticks with a forecast of flat house prices nationally this year.

Moore Blatch, a law firm specialising in repossession proceedings has found that four out of five lenders believe home repossessions will soar this year, as heavily indebted first-time buyers and buy-to-let investors struggle to meet higher costs. The group found that 40 per cent of lenders believe repossessions will rise by between 10 and 15 per cent this year, while 8 per cent anticipate sharper rises. Almost 70 per cent of lenders thought first-time buyers would face the worst difficulties and half thought buy-to-let borrowers would run into problems.

And finally, a young couple in America were handed a blank cheque by a stranger in a cafe and told to fill it in for as much money as they needed. Assuming the gentleman was joking, they filled it in for $100,000. He demanded conditions – that neither their last names nor his were identified, and they were to use the money to buy a house – and then signed the cheque, saying, ‘I’m good for it’. The couple have since cashed it for the full amount.