The figures have shown falls in UK house prices, which might threaten people's sense of affluence and their readiness to borrow and spend. However, as we have said before, a change in pension rules presages a tidal wave of new money into housing, money which, in the absence of new supply, can only raise prices.

The rule is for self-invested personal pensions (SIPPS). From April 6th next year, people will be able to include residential housing, including principal or second homes, plus buy-to-let housing, into their SIPP, where they had previously been limited to commercial property. Christine Seib runs the story in the Times, citing a survey by Hargreaves Lansdown.

Hargreaves Lansdown found that 37 per cent of its existing Sipps clients planned to buy a residential property with their pensions. If this percentage is extrapolated from the 140,000 people who own a Sipp, there would be more than 50,000 people willing to take advantage of the new rules.

The average Sipp property purchase is expected to be worth £195,000, which means that savers are likely to spend £10 billion on new properties, £8.5 billion of which would be spent in Britain — equivalent to about 5 per cent of the value of the UK property market.

This is a wall of money, and it may well be a considerable underestimate. If the wheels were coming off the Chancellor's economy (as the falling growth rate suggests), this could keep them turning a little longer by sustaining consumer demand. If there were to be an eventual collapse in the housing market, though, it could hit the value of people's pensions as well as their property assets. By then, of course, the Chancellor might have moved house himself, and it would be someone else's problem.