28th September 2022
Dear Sir/Madam
As you are aware, our campaign to help Mortgage Prisoners has been ongoing for nearly 4 years now with borrowers trapped on high variable rates for well over a decade.
In that time, we have requested multiple times that something be done to help those unable to move from the likes of Heliodor and Landmark, among others. You will also know that the rates of 4,5,6,7%+ interest that mortgage prisoners have been paying over that decade have been allowed to persist with no regulatory intervention as we were told they were not being treated any differently to other borrowers or unfairly.
However, now that the wider public are set to have interest rates raised to those kind 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.
BUT the biggest upset of all is the fact 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.
We as a campaign group and others with an interest in our plight have been sold a lie for years having been told these entities could not offer alternate products. People trapped on interest only who asked to be moved to repayment and were refused, to name but one of several scenarios. Although you are aware that the country has seen an all-time low in rates for a decade and people have been encouraged to switch at every possibility, last week I watched Sheldon Mills sit on GMB speaking to Martin Lewis explaining there would be no change in affordability criteria to help those people that are trying to move. The same people that have been sat with 2 companies for over a decade who have the ability to offer new terms and products as they DO have a lending licence for existing customers. Yet you have allowed a decade of suffering to families who have been trapped with companies they did not choose and on rates, now considered extortionate according to the media etc. while even banks are removing mortgage products overnight due to not knowing where rates may end up.
Sheldon Mills stated that companies should work with their customers. Yet 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.
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 SVRs.
Yours faithfully
Rachel Neale