Our two primary objectives when introducing these measures were, first, enhancing the resilience of households and banks to economic and financial shocks and, second, reducing in a structural way the pro-cyclicality that can be inherent in housing and credit markets by capping the amount of high LTV and LTI mortgages allowed at any time.
However, while we have emphasised in all our public communications that it is not our objective to target house prices, this has proven in fact to be a very difficult message to get across to the public. Underlying much of the public discourse on the mortgage rules is the central issue of affordability.