FCA Understanding mortgage prisoners

Following the FCA's Policy Statement on the changes to the responsible lending rules, it has published further data on the mortgage prisoner population. The FCA's Mortgage Market Study estimated that around 140,000 borrowers were unable to switch to a better deal even though they were up-to-date with their payments. To help fix this it changed its rules late last year to allow lenders to assess affordability based on a borrower’s track record of making mortgage payments. The charts show analysis of the entire dataset which includes all borrowers in closed mortgage books and those who have mortgages owned by unregulated firms regardless of their eligibility to switch because of our new rules. The FCA conducted a data gathering exercise which collected details on all mortgage accounts owned by unregulated firms. This data was combined with details of mortgage accounts held in closed books of regulated firms.