Legal & General’s lifetime mortgage advances, including retirement interest-only home loans, plummeted 53% to £299m from a year ago “reflecting a decline in demand as a result of higher interest rates.”  

“Throughout this period, we have maintained pricing and underwriting discipline,” the financial services giant adds in its full-year statement. 

The firm’s lifetime mortgage trading outperformed the wider equity release market, as lending in this sector tumbled 62% to £2.1bn last year as plan sales and drawdowns fell, according to Key’s Equity Release Market Monitor 2023 last month.    

The report said later life lending last year was hit by “base rate rises and the aftershocks of the September 2022 mini-Budget”. 

Overall, Legal & General reports full-year operating profit at £1.7bn, broadly in line with the prior year but around 5% below market expectations. 

Its institutional annuities trading jumped 30.5% to a record £13.7bn over the period. 

The group adds it is on track to meet its five-year targets from 2020 and 2024, which includes dividends growing at 5% a year and capital generation between £8bn to £9bn, currently at £6.8bn. 

Legal & General chief executive António Simões says the group “demonstrated resilience in challenging markets to achieve record new business volumes in pension risk transfer, UK annuities and US protection, increasing our store of future profit”. 

Shares in early trading fell 2.2% to 239.9p.