Building society subsidiaries were the main carriers of bad news, with Scarborough BS shutting its subsidiary, and Derbyshire BS’ Salt brand pulling out of non-conforming.
Scarborough said it was shutting Scarborough Specialist Mortgages to new lending with immediate effect, although all pipeline business would be honoured.
The society blamed the continuing problems in the credit markets for its decision, although it insisted that loans through the building society brand and its commitment to the intermediary market would be unaffected.
Market changes were also blamed for Salt’s decision to end non-conforming lending, with a combination of levelling house prices and a continually uncertain economic outlook forcing its focus towards originating prime and buy-to-let business.
Fahim Antoniades, director at Quantum Mortgage Brokers, believed there were still plenty of twists and turns left for lenders as the credit crunch continued to wreck havoc in the market.
He explained: “The whole credit crunch has been quite unfortunate for building societies. They have always been seen as quite old-fashioned and they were only recently becoming a bit more adventurous through subsidiaries.
"They were just getting an appetite for things like non-conforming but now they have been hit. I think they might be scared off for a while now.”
Neil Johnson, head of PR and policy at the Building Societies Association, believed the societies would be back once the market settled down.
He said: “These things will ebb and flow with the economic tide but I’m sure we have not seen the last of them. Building societies are increasingly looking at covering various sectors of the market as well as diversifying and subsidiaries help do this. I’m sure when the market returns to something like normality we will see these options once more.”
Elsewhere, Paragon Group announced a major restructuring of its proposition, merging the sales force of its Paragon Mortgages and Mortgage Trust brands. 93 jobs were due to be cut across the Group, including the current head of sales at Mortgage Trust, Austin Jelfs.
John Heron, director of mortgages at Paragon, insisted the changes were about placing the business in the best possible position for when the market returned.
He explained: “Our staff have been fantastic in growing this business over the years and more recently in dealing with the challenges created by the credit crunch. It is with great regret that we will have to let some of them go.
"These changes are being made to ensure that we can adjust our business to the current environment and to position ourselves to take advantage of improved conditions in the future.”
This came at the same time as Vertex announced it was shedding a further 28 people on its db mortgages account, having already cut 38 posts in December. Money Partners also said it had begun a further consultation with staff but numbers and departments affected were unknown as Mortgage Introducer went to press.
Other lenders to make changes this week included Northern Rock, which said it would stop originating near-prime and non-conforming mortgages for SPML, and Intelligent Finance, which cut its maximum loan-to-value from 95 per cent to 90 per cent.
