miércoles, 31 de agosto de 2011

Banks to tell families: cut back or face losing your home - Telegraph.co.uk

The organisation will telephone around 2,000 customers a week over the coming months and advise them how best to manage their finances should rates rise.

The company could also check with credit agencies to see which borrowers have mounting debts.

"Some people won't cope when interest rates rise, but for others there are remedies," said Richard Banks, the AKAR chief executive who is a former director of Alliance & Leicester.

"They need to think about what is their most important debt. It is not their credit card or renewing their Sky subscription, or going out for the latest mobile technology. It is their mortgage.

"We want customers to look at their finances and change their behaviour."

A spokesman for UKAR added: "We will ask them to tell us what their expenditure is and what they are spending it on, and we will then be able to help them prioritise their finances to avoid getting into arrears."

It is estimated that a one percentage point rise in interest rates will reduce the disposable income available to each UK household by £230 a year.

UKAR wants to ensure that borrowers have enough money to pay off their mortgages rather than spend their disposable incomes on lifestyle or luxury items.

If necessary, the organisation could put people in touch with charities who can offer further advice on financial matters.

But Experian, the country's biggest credit agency, said a company must always get a customer's permission to run a credit check.

The Information Commissioners' Office, which police's data privacy, said banks should be "upfront" about what credit checks they undertake or risk breaching the Data Protection Act.

Melanie Bien, of the independent mortgage broker Private Finance, described the checks as "unprecedented".

"I've never heard of banks doing credit checks midway through a mortgage deal before," she said.

"You qualify for your mortgage and then, halfway down, they are checking up on you. It is outrageous."

The spokesman said that it is not UKAR's role to dictate how people spend their money.

However he said that borrowers need to be made aware of their obligations to the nationalised banks. he said the credit checks was intended to be "positive" measure.

"There is a temptation to pay whoever is shouting loudest," he said.

"This is not a Big Brother thing, but we are taking a sensible pragmatic approach should people get into trouble.

Credit checks are carried out to check a customer's ability to meet their obligations."

Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley were nationalised in 2008 and 2009 respectively, and their mortgage books at the time were closed to new borrowers.

In total UKAR oversees 750,000 borrowers, with total loans of around £80 billion between them.

UKAR believes that customers have to a large extent been protected by low interest rates. Economists expect rates to rise at some point late next year as the UK's growth start to accelerate

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