Michael White of The Guardian pointed out in a recent article that the lat week of February saw an awful lot of record lows and bad financial news. House-building was reported at its lowest point since 1980; repossessions were running at a 12-year high and buy-to-let mortgages at a five-year low, since this free-fall began barely a day goes by without some sort of negative news.
White discusses briefly the concept that I covered in yesterday’s blog, the fact that renting on a long term basis is seen as some sort of failure here in Britain, something that does not have the same sort of connotations in other parts of Europe.
His reason for discussing this was to point out that successive governments had put a lot of money into trying to create affordable housing for people to purchase. A lot of these schemes are now in trouble.
White’s main point seems to be that in order to arrest this frightening fall there is really only one way forward. The government needs to do anything it can to get banks lending again. that is the only way forward.
