BBC PANORAMA Mortgage Prisoners

dunstonh

There a few too many holier than thou on here.. Its easy to pick holes in the example shown in the programme,

Panorama has a reputation for things like this though. They did a programme on pensions some years back and it was ridiculed in the pensions section of this board. It included someone that didnt have a pension but had poor quality buy to lets it was the pension companies fault somehow. It had someone who had only paid £30pm for 30 years but somehow expected thousands a month in retirement. And, in an example similar to the one mentioned higher up, someone who said they couldnt afford to pay more but had rows and rows of xbox games and DVDs on the shelves with big TV and lots of consumers spent items.

but equally I'm sure there are those that have lost their job

Unfortunate. However, if they had PPI, then that would have covered them. (cue the next irony as we have seen at least one post on this site where someone complained about PPI, had their policy voided but then later on actually suffered a claimable event that the PPi would have paid out on).

kingstreet

On the subject of Northern Rock's Together product, I would like to say (once again!) this was a useful tool for brokers for the right borrower.

It wasn't a 125% mortgage. It was secured mortgage of upto 95% (if you had any sense you did 90%!) and an unsecured loan at the same rate upto £30,000 or to a total of 125% of the purchase price.

It required evidence of income.

It was only available to higher scoring applicants.

It was therefore not sub-prime, nor was it self-certification.

A responsible borrower could purchase a property, carry out repairs and improvements, consolidate debt and leave themselves paying less than they had been previously for rent/credit.

I have no doubt it was used for the wrong borrowers who simply paid off debt then re-drew it. That was always possible. It also had to be properly explained and I suspect that was not always the case.

However, the suggestion that all Together borrowers are at fault and somehow deserved to be on standard variable rate for their entire mortgage lives is unfair.

A lot of people wiser than them (and me) didn't see the 2007/8 meltdown coming. We are supposed to have regulators for that, aren't we...?

Edi81

4.74% is an ok SVR.
Lots of people stay on this with the other big mortgage providers -eg Nationwide, Halifax.
They could switch product easily but don’t so why is that necessarily a bad thing.

Ultimately, the government was damned either way! Either they sold the portfolio to Landmark or kept it. Either way they would have been the baddies!

And as for the point where securitisation was such a bad thing.....don’t get me started! This is standard business practice in the industry!

amnblog

Totally with KS.

The product served a purpose in a market where deposit was the issue for many rather than servicing the Lender.

Northern Rock’s arrears figures were relatively low as you needed a strong profile to qualify.

It winds me up the wall when people blame products like this for the market meltdown.

Yes, Northern Rock was trying to do too much business, but the product was a good one.

Thrugelmir

amnblog wrote: »

Northern Rock’s arrears figures were relatively low as you needed a strong profile to qualify.

They were understated from January 2005 onwards. Two executives, one the finance director at the time of collapse, were subsequently severely censured.