That annual rate of house price inflation has held steady for three months in a row.

That annual rate of house price inflation has held steady for three months in a row. Prices rose 1.1 per cent between January and February, whereas economists had expected prices to register a small decline of about 0.3 per cent. «Recent reductions in mortgage rates, improving consumer confidence, and a continuing resilience in the labour market are arguably helping to stabilise prices following the falls seen in November and December,» Kim Kinnaird, director of Halifax Mortgages, said. Halifax’s data goes against what was reported last week by Nationwide, which estimated that prices fell for the sixth consecutive month in February and were now 1.1 per cent below where they were at the start of 2022.

House prices are now about 3 per cent below their August peak, Halifax said, but that is not as bad as some economists had feared back in the autumn. Property prices surged during the pandemic amid the «race for space» as many people, having been confined to their homes for weeks on end, looked to move to a bigger house with more garden space and room for a home office. On Halifax’s measure, house prices fell for four straight months between September and December. The annual rate of house price inflation, which had peaked at 12.5 per cent in the summer, had dropped to 2.1 per cent by the end of 2022.

The property market in London is struggling the most, Halifax’s data showed. House prices in the capital are 0.9 per cent below where they were this time last year. By contrast, in Northern Ireland, prices are still 5.7 per cent higher compared with 12 months ago. Halifax suggested that London was being affected by its large proportion of flats, values of which have declined by 0.3 per cent on average over the past year.

Prices of terraced houses have broadly flatlined compared with this time last year, while detached houses are worth 1.5 per cent more.

www.sba.tax

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

Transport department officials have begun work on «Project Silverlight» suggesting the highspeed rail scheme might face four additional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces further delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by ministers to rein in its ballooning costs. The extra delays to the country’s biggest infrastructure project would mean that it would not be completed until as late as 2045 — 12 years after originally planned. «This is a function of inflation; we are having to find huge savings because the cost of everything the department is already doing will have become so much more expensive by then,» said one government official. In October, the FT reported that the Treasury had asked HS2’s management team to identify potential cuts or «scope reductions» to the high-speed line. Transport department officials have subsequently begun work on Project Silverlight aimed at fi...

Small business will be excluded from fraud law.

Ministers are planning to exclude small businesses from anti-fraud legislation by narrowing the scope of a criminal offence targeting companies that fail to prevent economic crimes. MPs and anti-corruption campaigners had hoped the government would seek to amend the economic crime and corporate transparency bill to ensure the new offence covered all companies. The plans to limit the scope of the amendments will also disappoint those who had hoped the legislation would remove key hurdles to the prosecution of white-collar crime. A new «failure to prevent» offence for fraud would bring it in line with existing similar corporate offences for bribery and tax evasion. At present, prosecutors need only prove that organisations lacked «reasonable» or «adequate» controls to pursue the offence in bribery and tax evasion cases. «It would be much more sensible for the government to provide strong guidance for SMEs on what these proce...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...

Search This Blog