The British Bankers’ Association data revealed some news of the same tone on Tuesday regarding the number of mortgages approved for October. In a continuing trend, last month saw the number of approvals slip by about 400 to 30,766. It was the lowest number of house approvals since March 2009.

There is a great chance this means house prices will fall next year, according to Howard Archer, economist of IHS Global Insight. He continued to say: "In our view, the housing market has got little going for it at the moment, apart from low mortgage rates - and that is if you can get a mortgage."

Across the UK, first time buyers are still faced with the dilemma of coming up with around 25 per cent of the purchase priced in cash. This drastically limits the range of prices in which that demographic can search for a house.

The gross mortgage lending tallied just 7.6 billion pounds in October. This is the lowest figure since February of 2001, and is more than 15 per cent lower than October of last year. At that time house prices were making a worthy comeback.

Net lending to private, non-financial companies also dropped last month. The drop was mild in comparison to the month of September, which saw a decline of 3.3 billion pounds. The October figure of 100 million pounds was also far from the six-month average monthly decline of 1.6 billion pounds.

David Dooks, stats director at the BBA, commented on lending to businesses, saying: "Credit availability for viable businesses have improved, so a continued contraction in net lending growth reflects repayment behaviour, particularly by larger companies,"