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Hello and welcome to Coffeyhouse Shots.

I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by Katie Balls and Kate Andrews. Now Kate, the news out in terms of the housing market today is that mortgage rates have been cut by the UK's biggest lenders as price war heats up. Tell us more.

Yeah, so let's not get too excited, but we are seeing some really positive indications

if you are looking to renew your mortgage this year.

That a bit of a price war is breaking out between Britain's largest mortgage lenders.

The banks have started to slash interest rates below 4% for five-year fixed-term mortgages.

We haven't seen numbers like this since summer last year. Now this will still be

significantly higher than what many people are locked in at and it's estimated

that 1.6 million borrowers are going to be looking to renew their mortgage this year.

So you will still very likely be renewing at a higher cost than what you signed on to for many people

in many cases.

So you don't necessarily want to flag this as the good news story, but obviously this is positive.

It suggests things are going in the right direction.

If we look at what's happening with inflation overall, we've seen some pretty positive news there too. Inflation on the year slowed to 3.9% in November.

That was significantly lower than the market had been estimating.

There's a lot of positive noises from independent forecasters at the moment, that inflation may return to

target at 2% well before it was expected.

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