How real is the ‘mortgage crisis’ and what, if anything, can be done to relieve it? BBC vox pops of borrowers whose monthly costs have already rocketed or who face imminent rate resets at 6 per cent or worse certainly give a dramatic impression. But in reality this is a slow-motion car-crash – for Rishi Sunak as well as the afflicted – in which some 1.4 million mortgages (out of a UK total of 13.2 million) will move to higher rates sometime this year and another million next year.
Forgive my arithmetic, by the way, but that looks like 18 per cent of the mortgage-holding population who constitute 28 per cent of all households, so just one in 20 households overall. And that compares with one in five households who live in rented accommodation, whose rents have risen by 10 per cent in the past year, who do not have the long-term consolation and security of bricks-and-mortar ownership, and who seem to be attracting rather less sympathy than about-to-be-squeezed borrowers in the current wave of media emotion.
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