Britain's mortgage lenders are still to increasing their interest rates for new customers and failing to pass on the cuts in market lending rates, which have been improving for several weeks.
Last week, the Bank of England felled its main interest rate by a third bringing it down to 3 per cent the lowest in more than 50 years. New data showed that inflation is falling more quickly than anticipated so further cuts in interest are expected, maybe as soon as next month. According to the Office for National Statistics inflation, based on the consumer prices index, slumped to an annual rate of 4.5 per cent in October, compared to 5.2 per cent the month before. Economists had been predicting a smaller drop but a slowdown in the rise of food prices, coupled with the effect of falling petrol prices both contributed to bringing the rate down more rapidly than expected.
Although existing homeowners with tracker mortgages are about to see a substantial cut in their monthly payments following this month's 1.5 percentage point drop in the Bank of England interest rate, consumers searching for new tracker deals will probably be paying a higher margin above the Bank rate than they would have done just a couple of weeks ago. The rate at which banks borrow funds to lend to mortgage borrowers and the rate at which banks lend to each other (known as Libor) has also decreased and is now down to just over 4 per cent, from around 5.7 per cent at the end of last month
Yet despite the gap between Libor and the Bank rate narrowing, lenders are continuing to increase their profit on new mortgage products. Halifax launched a new range of trackers which vary between 1.99 and 2.39 percentage points higher than the Bank rate.
Similarly, Alliance & Leicester, Abbey and Lloyds also released new trackers all costing at least 1.79 percentage points above the Bank rate.
David Hollingworth, of independent broker London & Country mortgages said: "The margins are very wide much wider than they were a month ago." He also claimed that for many consumers, the biggest problem at the moment is that the majority of products are only available to those with a low loan to value [LTV].
Nearly all of the new trackers on the market are only available to borrowers who have more than 25 per cent equity in their property.
For customers who have a mortgage which accounts for 80 per cent or more of their current property value, it is now near impossible to get a tracker mortgage deal. And for homeowners with a 90 per cent loan to value, there is only a tiny selection of products on offer and the interest rates on most of these are more than double the Bank rate.
Mr Hollingworth said more and more of borrowers may have to return to their bank's standard variable rate (SVR). This, however, may not be as unattractive as it once was because lots of banks have reduced their SVRs by 1.5 percentage points after the Chancellor pressurized them to pass the full Bank rate cut on to borrowers.
The banks decision to raise the margin on their trackers was defended by Sue Anderson, of the Council of Mortgage Lenders: "It reflects the mix of business levels that lenders now have," she said. "A lot of lenders fully cut their SVRs by 1.5 percentage points, even though their own funding cost would not have been cut by that amount."
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