The programme, which criticised London Scottish Mortgages, Alliance & Leicester and Platform for irresponsible lending, alluded to a potential crash in the market and of duped consumers who have lost their homes because of irresponsible lending.
One case showed a couple who were given a NINJA mortgage by London Scottish Bank. The couple, in their late 50s, had poor health and were on benefits. However, they still managed to attain a 25 year mortgage at a high interest rate.
Platform was accused of lending to another couple who had to move home because of failure to meet repayments, while further details also showed a nurse on £25,000 a year, who was offered a ten times salary mortgage from A&L and then another BTL non-conforming mortgage with Platform. However, Platform has refuted all claims of irresponsible lending.
A spokesperson for Brittania, Platform’s parent company said: “The individual cases featured in the Panorama programme contained a number of factual inaccuracies about Britannia and our approach to mortgage lending. There is a higher degree of risk to sub-prime lending, because generally speaking customers’ incomes are less secure. As a result, we charge a higher price for these mortgages. All sub-prime mortgages go through rigorous checks, including ensuring that customers can afford the repayments. We typically do not lend more than four times salary and never lend more than 95% of the value of a house.
Peter Williams, executive director at IMLA, also condemned the programme. "The programme was largely based on the cases of just three somewhat atypical customers, and consider the content unduly sensationalist and not representative of the market as a whole. We were disturbed to note that in the programme there were examples of borrowers who knowingly signed mortgage applications containing inaccurate information and we do hope the programme has reinforced the message that this is fraud and not, as suggested by one customer, an acceptable 'white lie'."
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