Mortgage and Credit Card Debt

GreatBigBookcase

Morning all, 

I need a small-ish mortgage to move.  I own my current house outright and expect to get around £180k for it.  A mortgage broker has said I could probably get a mortgage of around £60k on my current part-time income. I also have a small business but that's fairly new and so any income from that can't be used for a mortgage application at this point. 

All good so far, but, I also have credit card debt of around £11,700k.  This is mainly due to using credit cards to help start up the business and living costs for a while when I wasn't working. I haven't used them for any spending in over 18 months and have no missed payments, etc. My credit rating is at the low end of ok/fair, due to high credit utilisation and high DTI. All other aspects of credit file are fine. It improves a little month on month but I think it might take a bit of a hit next month due to searches that have been done whilst applying for 0% credit cards? 

So since starting a new job I have been able to get a three 0% balance transfer credit cards and I've transferred about £4000 of the debt to those. I applied last night for a Barclaycard and was surprised to be offered a credit limit of £9600. This comes with 0% balance transfer for 24 months.

I will obviously transfer the rest of the debt I'm paying interest on to that card. I'm overpaying as much as I can each month, and I intend to pay off all the debt with money from my house sale anyway, so it will be paid off before the interest rate kicks in.

So, my question is about how to make myself look as good as possible to a mortgage lender? I've seen some articles talking about credit utilisation being key...e.g. owing below 50% of the credit available to you...whilst others say debt to income ratio is key. 

This is a very long winded way of asking: is it better (from a mortgage application viewpoint) to have the debt spread out across the 4 x 0% credit cards I have so that I'm using a lower % of each card's credit availability?  Or is it better to have the debt on fewer credit cards?  In which case I would transfer as much as I can to the £9600 card, leaving just £2kish on one other card. Or, will it not matter at all?

Also, again from a mortgage application perspective, is it better to close down the credit cards I'm not using?  Or does the 'access to credit' make me look more favourable? 

Any thoughts on how best to manage this would be really appreciated. I'm single, with a part time income and 1 dependent, so I'm not massively attractive to mortgage lenders I shouldn't think. And I need to maximise the amount I can borrow in order to make the move worth it.

Thanks.