Not that difficult to buy a home in UK, says NatWest chair
The chair of NatWest has claimed it is not “that difficult” to get on the property ladder, despite the number of first-time buyers with a mortgage falling to the lowest level in a decade.
“I don’t think it is that difficult at the moment,” Sir Howard Davies told the BBC.
Pressed about this assertion, he added: “You have to save and that is the way it always used to be.”
His comments to Radio 4’s Today programme follow a report published earlier this week by Yorkshire Building Society which found that the number of first-time buyers who bought a home with a mortgage fell to the lowest level in a decade in 2023.
A 20% deposit on a typical first-time buyer home equated to about 105% of the average annual gross income, according to the report, though this is down from a high of 116% in 2022.
Davies told Today: “I totally recognise that there are people who are finding it very difficult to start the process [of buying a house]. They will have to save more, but that is, I think, inherent in the change in the financial system as a result of the mistakes that were made in the last global financial crisis.”
On Friday, the lender Halifax recorded the third monthly rise in house prices in a row in December, with the typical home costing £287,105.
“Was there ever a more out-of-touch statement about home buying?” said Marty Naan, a mortgage and protection adviser. “Telling first-time buyers it’s not that difficult to get on the ladder is quite simply a slap in the face to people struggling to make ends meet, never mind save for a deposit on a mortgage.”
It is not the first time that Davies, who is to stand down as chair of the banking group later this year, has faced a furore over ill-advised comments.
Last year, he weathered calls for his resignation after initially backing Alison Rose in the row over a media leak pertaining to the closure of the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage’s accounts with NatWest subsidiary Coutts.
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Rose was forced to resign as NatWest chief executive and the banking group scrapped almost £7.6m in potential payouts over the scandal.
In 2022, Davies made headlines when he told hundreds of staff at a private event that he “never felt so embarrassed internationally” as he did at the International Monetary Fund meeting in the wake of the UK’s disastrous mini-budget unveiled by the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng.