Porting mortgages - First Direct

gibbinsk

Hello,
My first post but have seen there is some excellent advice on here so hopefully someone can help me out.
We have a First Direct lifetime tracker offset mortgage at 0.98% above BR which is obviously a good deal. Now, we want to move to a bigger house and we would really like to keep our current property. Several reasons for this, but mainly we feel that now is not the best time to sell and with such low interest rates (even maybe on a buy-to-let mortgage) the repayments are affordable even when we take out another mortgage for the new property (and even if interest rates go up as they no doubt will do at some stage). We were thinking of renting out the property, which should easily cover the mortgage payments.
We have done the assessment and First Direct will loan us the extra money for property number 2 even considering that we are keeping the current one.... BUT they will not allow us to 'port' the current loan over to the new property if we keep ownership of our current house (but they will if we sell it). Nor will they allow us to keep the current deal on the current house if we are not living there (because they don't do buy-to-let mortgages).
OK, I know we are trying to have our cake and eat it but I don't see why FD won't let us 'port' the existing mortgage unless we sell our current property. They have already determined that we can afford to keep it and the mortgage will be with another provider anyway.
Also, I have scoured the small print of the contract, and nowhere does it say that you cannot rent out the property or that it can only be ported when you sell your property. I am only going on what the lady said on the phone. Do you think this is right? Is there any way round it?!
Thanks in advance,
Katie