Why mortgages will remain hard to get

New rules to be decided on mortgage lending could lead to lower house prices, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

This isn't the best of times for those looking for a mortgage. A mere 63,000 were approved in April, down from almost 76,000 in January. That might sound like a lot. But the long-term average from 1993 to 2007 was more like 99,000 a month, says David Smith in The Sunday Times.

Some of this is down to the change in focus of the Funding for Lending Scheme away from mortgages, and some will be a consequence of the April introduction of the Mortgage Market Review (MMR), which forces lenders to be sure that borrowers can afford the loans they are offered.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.