UK Mortgage Prisoners lead campaigner Rachel Neale has urged the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and government to enforce non-lenders who choose not to lend to offer fairer rates
Mortgage prisoners could be facing rates of 9% and above in the current economic climate, according to the UK Mortgage Prisoners lead campaigner Rachel Neale.
In a letter sent today, Neale has urged the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and government to enforce non-lenders who choose not to lend to offer fairer rates.
With mortgage prisoners paying mortgage rates of between 4% and 9% for over a decade, Neale says the UK government has ‘done nothing to help us’.
Neale states: Now that the wider public is set to have interest rates raised to those kinds of percentage rates the media, along with economists are raising an outcry of unfairness, asking how people will pay their mortgages and be able to live and buy food and pay their other bills. Surely you can see the irony here.
However, she says the ‘biggest upset’ is that the financial industry, FCA, UK Finance and Treasury ‘continue to allow the likes of Landmark and Heliodor to choose not to offer new rates when they can’.
Speaking on the television programme Good Morning Britain with Martin Lewis, FCA executive director, consumers and competition Sheldon Mills last week stated that companies should work with their customers.
However, Neale says ‘the FCA and UK Finance have been part of the reason that they are allowed to choose to impose high rates on their struggling customers’.
In the letter, she asks: Can you explain why it has been stated that these entities who hold the vast majority of mortgage prisoners’ accounts cannot provide products at fixed rates or allow customers to switch product type, etc? Why has this been permitted to occur while all the time we have been told Landmark/Heliodor etc cannot offer alternatives, that they have instead chosen not to? Why has FCA not intervened?
We need urgent answers. The recent statement on the Citizens Advice super-complaint on the mortgage loyalty penalty concludes no intervention is required. We cannot understand how you can stand by this particularly given that it is the most vulnerable who are trapped on standard variable rates, Neale concludes.