The Guardian reports this morning that:
The chancellor will urge the UK's largest banks to do all they can to support those struggling to pay their mortgage during the cost-of-living crisis when he holds his first talks with chief executives on Wednesday.
Jeremy Hunt will host a roundtable with heads of major mortgage lenders, including Debbie Crosbie of Nationwide, HSBC UK's Ian Stuart and NatWest's Alison Rose to discuss the impact of rising interest rates and living costs on customers.
He could, of course, simply tell the Bank of England to stop and then reverse its wholly unnecessary interest rate increases that will have no positive impact on the control of inflation. He has the power to do so under the Bank of England Act 1998. But I suspect Hunt will not do that because, like the Bank, he would rather people suffer.
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Or is it that he’s just making sure his Party’s funders are just raking money in?
Both intentions seem applicable to me.
It gives the impression of doing something. Then all Tory MPs, when interviewed, will repeat the script to say Hunt has told them to do all they can and the lamestream media will parrot that. The Banks will then say they are doing all they can do – more accurately, though, all they want to do which is very little.
Craig
Hunt is passing the buck, when the govt should be dealing with the problems that they have caused. How does he expect profiteering banks to “support” customers with their mortgages? A payment holiday is likely the best you’ll get, so you can eventually finish paying off your debt in your dotage.
Hunt could tell the BoE what to do…. but in any rational world the Bank would not need telling – it would be doing it anyway.
Whilst lower (or at least not rising) rates are the correct short term response to housing poverty more needs to be done. Controls on ownership, rents; credit controls etc. need to be considered.
Agreed
The whole expensive cost of living in the UK is because of completely insane property prices, unrestrained BTL (with tax breaks), no rent controls which the rest of Europe has had for decades.
The solution which no one here will ever suggest is to destroy the property market by whatever means: put a capital gains tax on all property sales including your main home: back tax on second homes and then force the sale of all of them and ban the same as in the Netherlands: ban upward only rent revues on commercial property. Also ban any applications for house building on prime agricultural land, there’s more tna enough brownfield sites.
The howls of outrage will be deafening and there will be some suicides from those who have based their financial future on property profits. The simple truth is that when so much capital is tied up in property it cannot be employed to create goods or services to generate profits from exports.
Why do so many Brits buy property in France because it is relatively cheap and why is that, because the French tax system doesn’t encourage speculation. If children inherit a house they have to pay taxes. If you buy property to make a profit, you pay capital gains tax on all but the smallest profits.
Decades ago a real Labour party could have passed legislation to achieve this. The present Labour party has a leader who is a BTL landlord and property junkies/turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. The UK has to radically change but it will not – all systems tend toward self perpetuation.
Politely, this is complete nonsense
I very nearly did nit post it, it is so crass
Sure we need to manage property better. But destroy the property market? I really don’t think you are in the right place here. This is absurd