Click here to see the yearly fall in property prices throughout the UK

Alistair Darling, as he prepares for his Pre-Budget Report on Monday, knows that he is under extraordinary pressure to produce measures that will reinvigorate the housing market, aid the failing construction sector and save families from repossession. This week there were calls for the Chancellor to reintroduce Miras, tax relief on mortgage interest payments, a concession abolished by Gordon Brown in the 1999 Budget. There are also demands for the temporary stamp duty holiday on properties up to £175,000 to be extended or even made more generous.

Housing associations are regarded as one solution to the rising number of repossessions resulting from job losses. Plans announced in September proposed that these non-profit bodies take over the homes of people facing repossession, who would become tenants, so allowing them to re-organise their finances. But Mr Darling needs to make cash available to these bodies to allow them to carry out this ambitious schemes.

Mr Darling cannot but be aware of the latest housing market statistics, which indicate how long some regions will take to recover from the slump. Savills, the estate agent, expects that house prices in the UK will not return to 2007 levels for a decade. Even in the South East and London - the areas likely to recover first - homeowners cannot expect a return to peak values until 2012 and 2013 respectively. Regions where home ownership has been more reliant upon mortgage borrowing, including the North West, North East and Northern Ireland, will take the longest to recover, according to Savills.

These forecasts assume that the base rate will fall to 2 per cent next year and that economic growth will return to 1per cent in 2010. However, they do not assume the introduction of any extra measures that the Chancellor could use to boost the market. Lucian Cook, of Savills, says: “While we have not anticipated any special measures, an extension of the stamp duty holiday would have limited impact because the problem is lack of mortgage finance. A return to Miras would have more impact as it could make loans more affordable again.”

The housing market is responding quickly to the mortgage drought, with homeowners in some towns feeling the squeeze more than others. This may explain why Globrix, the property search engine part-owned by News International, parent company of The Times, found that in the past week more sellers reduced the asking prices of properties in Norwich than anywhere else, with 106 homeowners cutting prices by an average of £13,683. Next on the list came Solihull, where 40 sellers have reduced their price by an average of £13,130 in the past week. Such data could be useful for Mr Darling as he seeks to decide who needs help - and how much.

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