Home Owners Set to Win Mortgage Refund

Lenders face being forced to hand back millions of pounds in fees imposed on customers who missed their monthly loan payments.

GMAC RFC has already been fined £2.8million and made to return £7.7million to borrowers when it was found to have acted unfairly.  This fine was partly due to the £45 a month charged to borrowers who were in arrears with their mortgage accounts.

The FSA believed this to be excessive and wasn’t a true reflection of the administration costs involved.

The ­Financial Services Authority crackdown is likely to lead to claims by hundreds of thousands of home owners who believe they have been harshly penalised. Bobby Kennedy, Gravitas Law, said: “This has been a long time coming as is long overdue. It is about time the watchdog stepped down on the side of the consumer.”

“A modest fee is acceptable for additional administration, but piling significant penalties on to households which are clearly struggling is unnecessary and will only serve to further line the bulging coffers of many lenders.

“When people are in trouble with their mortgage they need help and advice and a bit of a breathing space – not to be hounded for even more money which they cannot repay.”

In the latest statistics according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders 195,000 borrowers are currently in arrears and this figure is expected to rise to 205,000 this year.

Outsourcing firm Homeloan Management (HML), part of the Skipton group, processes loans for more than 400,000 other borrowers, including customers of the Derbyshire and Cheshire Building Societies.

Although HML refuses to publish statistics on arrears, a similar pool of 400,000 loans from Gmac-RFC shows that 20 per cent of borrowers are behind with payments. This suggests that as many as 80,000 customers with loans processed by HML are being charged a monthly fee that the FSA deems unfair.

An industry insider said: “It’s a question of when, not if, this will apply to other lenders.
Gravitas Law can help you reclaim your excessive mortgage fees.

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Tags: 45 per month charge, fsa, mis-sold mortgages, mortgage arrears

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 9:08 am and is filed under Why were mortgages mis sold?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.