Borrowing

The average house price in Edinburgh rose by 2.8% annually last month, according to figures from the Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre (ESPC). The average price of a property sold during February stood at £200,126, up from £194,678 during the same month last year. The rise marked the sixth time in the last seven months during which an annual increase had been recorded in the Capital.

Edinburgh's housing market ended 2009 in better health than a year ago, according to the ESPC's report for the last quarter of 2009, with the average house price up from £193,354 to £218,043, an annual increase of 12.8%. The average house price in Edinburgh has now increased annually during each of the last five months of 2009, reflecting a trend seen across the UK.

One of the effects of the massive evaporation of easy credit both in Britain and around the world in recent months has been deflation. In 2009, Britain is expected to officially enter into its first deflationary period in 49 years when the Retail Price Index, which measures the price of goods and services, drops below zero.

Some of the building societies in this U.K. list have been taken over - for example, Britain's biggest building society, the Nationwide, has merged with the smaller Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Dunfermline building societies, but their individual brands (and web sites) are still active. However, The Staffordshire, which was

Some of these banks have merged - the obvious examples being NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland or HBOS (Halifax-Bank of Scotland) with LloydsTSB. Since the new LloydsTSB megabank has retained the brands of the original, individual banks, they are listed separately here.

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