Responding to today's mortgage approvals data from the Bank of England, the director general of the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), Michael Coogan, said: "It comes as no surprise that approvals for house purchase have continued to decline. This will result in a substantially lower level of housing transactions in 2008 than we saw last year.
"We believe that the Bank of England's Special Liquidity scheme will help to sustain confidence in the banking system and improve liquidity, but it is not an intervention specifically intended to re-invigorate the housing or mortgage markets.
"We hope that some of the liquidity will be recycled down into the mortgage market. But it will take some months for this to happen and mortgage lending volumes are going to continue to fall before they improve because of the funding gap of around £30 billion."
