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Help for mortgage prisoners

If you've struggled to switch mortgage deals even when you haven't missed any payments, you might be what's called a 'mortgage prisoner'. 

Spotting if you’re a mortgage prisoner

If you took out your mortgage more than 16 years ago you may be stuck with it because you don’t meet the minimum criteria that was introduced by the government in 2008. This means you are trapped in your current mortgage and could end up paying more than you need to.

In 2019 new rules were introduced that allowed us to give customers stuck in their mortgage a better chance of moving to a better deal (it is called the Modified Affordability Assessment rules).

The new rules

If you’re a mortgage prisoner, under the new rules, we can choose not to apply certain criteria as long as we can show that the new mortgage is more affordable than your current deal.

This means that we might not need to do the following:

  • An income and expenditure assessment
  • Consider what might happen to interest rates in the future.

Please note though, you must meet certain criteria to be eligible for the new rules.

Understanding if you're eligible

We can apply the new rules if:

  1. You're able to prove that your current mortgage is with an inactive lender. You should have received a letter from them to say you are a mortgage prisoner. If you haven’t, you can check the MoneyHelper website to see if they are inactive.
  2. You're up to date with your mortgage payments with no missed payments within the last 12 months on all secured borrowing that would be part of the new mortgage application.
  3. Our new mortgage deal is more affordable than the mortgage you are currently paying.
  4. You're not looking to borrow any more money unless if to cover any fees with the new mortgage or to consolidate one or more secured loan.
  5. You meet our standard lending policies and product limits.

We will apply other areas of lending policy as part of your application

If you do qualify

If you do qualify for one of our products, we recommend you think about the benefits of keeping the monthly repayments the same as you currently pay if the new mortgage payments are lower. It would reduce the length of your mortgage and reduce the amount of interest you would pay, therefore reducing the total cost of your mortgage.