One source told Mortgage Introducer: “This has come as a bit of a shock to the staff involved. Business has been slow but the loss of 100 staff will have an impact on the local area.”
HML, a subsidiary of Skipton, manages around £50bn in assets for over 30 UK and Irish lenders. If it was a lender itself, it would rank in the top 10.
But a major source of HML’s success in the last 10 years has been the expansion of the specialist lending sector. That sectors’ demise since the credit crunch is thought to have hit the coffers hard.
A spokeswoman for HML confirmed the planned redundancies but stressed: "HML is successful but we need to rightsize the business. Times are tough and in normal market conditions natural attrition would have accounted for the loss of these staff."
Although based in Skipton HML has operations in four other areas including Glasgow, Scarborough, Padiham in Lancashire and Derry in Northern Ireland. Mortgage Introducer understands that HML is in the process of reviewing every role in the company - although that does not necessarily mean that every role is at risk.
The spokeswoman added: "We need to look at where we are now and where we are going in the future."
