There are lies, damned lies and statistics — and, in this case, false statistics. A team of number-crunchers were left red-faced yesterday after they had to withdraw the latest national mortgage figures because of errors.
UK Finance, which represents Britain’s leading banks and describes itself as “the collective voice” of the finance industry, said yesterday that it had identified an “anomaly” in its closely watched household lending update a few hours after publishing the report.
Analysts had started drawing pessimistic conclusions about the state of the housing market after UK Finance claimed that banks had approved the fewest mortgages last month in almost six years.
