Alistair Darling pledges to help UK property market

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by Kay Murchie

Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has pledged to support the UK housing market and said the Government will do all it can.

There has been a lot of misery in the UK housing market recently with The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) saying market sentiment has fallen to a 30-year low.

Last week, the latest Halifax house price survey showed that the average home declined nearly £5,000 in value last month. This is a fall of 2.5% and represents the biggest monthly fall since September 1992, when prices fell by 3% in a month.

Furthermore, there are now only 4,100 different mortgage deals on the market, compared with 15,599 last July.

Alistair Darling recently said that the Government is willing to take whatever action is necessary in order to keep housing buoyant.

Mr Darling highlighted some of the work that was already being done to help the housing market and said that more would follow.

We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to support the wider financial market and therefore, through that, the housing market, he said.

Mr Darling has this week been urging mortgage lenders to pass on recent interest rate cuts on to homeowners and said it was time they did their bit after being helped by the Bank of England injecting £15 billion into the markets, amid the credit squeeze.

Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, met with senior executives of Abbey, Barclays, HBOS, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide and the Royal Bank of Scotland on Tuesday to discuss the housing market, to promote inter-bank lending and general market conditions.