Mortgage lenders and brokers are unlikely to welcome the fact that complaints about mortgages have more than doubled since last year, according to the latest Financial Ombudsman’s report.
The largest number of complaints overall came from dissatisfied endowment mortgage policyholders, who constituted 14,500 of FOS complaints. An additional 3,900 complaints came from others wishing to take the mortgage industry to task.
Mortgage endowment complaints had risen by 60% from the previous year while complaints about mortgages shot up by 55%.
The ombudsman said it was expecting this figure to increase following the second round of endowment re-projection letters sent to policyholders by life insurance companies.
Another hot topic for 15 per cent of complaints has been 'dual' mortgage rates, where some lenders moved from having a single variable rate mortgage interest rate to having two variable mortgage interest rates, in some cases without moving existing customers to the lower one.
The ombudsman was also forced to rule on three main cases relating to Abbey National, Halifax and Nationwide. As a result Nationwide gave 400,000 borrowers refunds totalling £90m after charging them the higher mortgage rate, while Halifax withdrew its new standard variable rate.
The case involving Abbey National is still ongoing.
