UK borrowing is forecast to be £45.2bn this year, £4.7bn lower than forecast last November and the country has experienced its first sustained fall in debt for 17 years, Chancellor Philip Hammond has said.
Delivering today’s Spring Statement, Hammond said the UK growth forecast has been revised up for 2018 from 1.4% to 1.5%.
Inflation is expected to return to its 2% target over the next 12 months.
Hammond said despite there being a 2018-19 surplus on the current account, he is not naive enough to think he has abolished the economic cycle and added that the Conservatives want to get rid of the deficit to give the next generation a chance.
Hammond said he does not think every available penny must be spent on debt reduction and does not agree with the “fantasists” from Labour who want to spend it all.
On the issue of housing, the Chancellor announced that an investment programme of £44bn to raise housing supply to 300,000 a year by the mid-2020s has been created, and an estimated 60,000 first-time buyers have already benefited from the stamp duty relief announced at the Autumn Budget.
The statement said the national living wage is also being raised to £7.83 per hour from next month – a pay rise of over £2,000 for a full-time worker since 2015.
Furthermore Hammond said: “We have cut taxes for 31 million working people by raising the personal allowance.
“Next year a typical taxpayer will pay £1,075 less income tax than in 2010-2011.”
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Figures from the National House-Building Council saw Q1 2025 register a 36% increase in new homes built across the UK compared with the same period last year, representing a striking development for the first-time buyer market. But with the higher cost of building, ongoing planning challenges and new and changing regulations, how sustainable is this growth? And what does it mean for brokers?
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Content editor, Dan McGrath, sat down with chief operating officer at Black & White Bridging, Damien Druce, and head of development finance at Empire Global Finance, Pete Williams, to explore the role of the bridging sector, the role of AI across the industry and how the property market has fared in the Labour Government’s first year in office.
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In this episode of the Barclays Mortgage Insider Podcast, host Phil Spencer is joined by Lucian Cook, Head of Research at Savills, and Ross Jones, founder of Home Financial and Evolve Commercial Finance, to explore how regional trends are redefining the UK housing, mortgage and buy-to-let markets.
In this episode of the Barclays Mortgage Insider Podcast, host Phil Spencer is joined by Lucian Cook, Head of Research at Savills, and Ross Jones, founder of Home Financial and Evolve Commercial Finance, to explore how regional trends are redefining the UK housing, mortgage and buy-to-let markets.
The new episode of The Mortgage Insider podcast, out now
Regional housing markets now matter more than ever. While London and the Southeast still tend to dominate the headlines from a house price and affordability perspective, much of the growth in rental yields and buyer demand is coming from other parts of the UK.
In this episode of the Barclays Mortgage Insider Podcast, host Phil Spencer is joined by Lucian Cook, Head of Research at Savills, and Ross Jones, founder of Home Financial and Evolve Commercial Finance.
In this episode of the Barclays Mortgage Insider Podcast, host Phil Spencer is joined by Lucian Cook, Head of Research at Savills, and Ross Jones, founder of Home Financial and Evolve Commercial Finance.
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