There were 29,490 new first-time buyer mortgages, a rise of 0.3% from December 2018, while home mover mortgages totalled 29,400, 3.2% more than in the same month the year before.

Remortgaging with additional borrowing was up by 5.9% year-on-year with 16,820 new completions and the average additional amount borrowed was £50,702.

New pound-for-pound remortgages (with no additional borrowing) slipped slightly by 0.5% to 16,490.

The number of new buy-to-let mortgages was also up, by 3.6% to 5,700 new loans and buy-to-let remortgaging increased by 2.3% on the previous year.

Jeremy Leaf, north London estate agent and a former RICS residential chairman, commented: “Trends in mortgage lending are always a useful indicator of future market direction. However, these figures reflect what was happening in the months leading up to the election so only show a more solid resilience in activity in what was still quite a turbulent period.

“Of just as much interest is the strong increase in buy-to-let home purchases, which we also noticed on the ground as aspiring first-time buyers squeezed by strict lending criteria continued to rent. This has encouraged more landlords to expand their portfolios or join the sector.”

Richard Pike, Phoebus Software sales and marketing director, said: “Earth-shattering today’s figures are not, but what they are is perhaps more than we might have hoped for.

“Not only have the numbers and values increased in most areas, but they have done it against a backdrop of real uncertainty.

“When you consider that most of the transactions would have been started three or four months earlier we might have been forgiven to expecting less favourable results.