Would you lend money to somebody who had a bad reputation for not paying people back? Or somebody who would really struggle to pay you back because their income is too low? Not many of us would. In the past the mortgage market has been very different, sometimes less questions were asked than we would ask ourselves if it were our own money.

According to the Chartered Institute of Housing, the "golden age of ownership" within the UK housing market has ended for a lot of people who can no longer afford to buy a home and must therefore look to live in rented accommodation. This may not seem like the ideal situation for a generation of people that have come to believe that homeownership is the best and maybe the only way they want to live, but perhaps it’s not such a bad option and we should change the way we see things.

There has been some good news recently with regard to death rates from breast cancer; a report has revealed that the death rates from this disease in the UK have fallen faster than any other major European country. The British Medical Journal has indicated that survival rates have increased significantly since the 1980s, with Cancer Research UK adding that sufferers are more than twice as likely to survive ten years than they were in the 1970s. The ten year survival rate for this cancer is estimated to be 77%. In addition, ten year survival rates for leukaemia, bowel and ovarian cancers have also overall more than doubled since the 1970s. There are many reasons for this success including faster diagnosis, better surgery, more effective radio therapy and new drugs. So real progress is being made, with this trend set to continue into the future.