Mortgages go back down the time tunnel

Commenting on last year having the lowest number of house purchase for 34 years, Louise Cuming, head of mortgages at moneysupermarket.com, said: "The fact that only 516,000 mortgages were taken out to buy homes last year clearly shows how ineffective the most recent rate cuts have been in stimulating the housing market.

"If the lending noose isn't loosened, then the market will stay at these historic low levels. We didn't even plummet to this type of figure in 1989 when the Bank of England rate hit 14.88 per cent.

"This is the worst result since 1974, when there were seven million fewer homes in the UK and we had an economy beset by industrial action and three-day weeks."