Brown and Darling achieve a great Pyrrhic victory
Posted on 28 November 2008 by
Nationwide have today announced that from 1 December they will no longer allow any new borrowing by either existing or new customers on their Standard Variable Rate, which they call Base Mortgage Rate (BMR). The only situation in which they will issue a new mortgage offer on BMR is if a Nationwide customer with some or all of their mortgage on BMR is moving home and wishes to port the amount on BMR to the new property. However, any additional borrowing will have to be on a fixed or tracker rate.
Thus less than a month after the breakfast meeting rolling out the Brown/Darling master plan to intimidate the major lenders into passing on the full 1.5% November Bank Rate cut in their SVRs the one with the lowest SVR and by far the largest proportion of its lending on SVR pulls the plug for all new lending on that rate.
Not only did the master plan not last for life, it didn’t even last until Christmas.
Categories: House and home, Interest rates, Mortgages, Regulation
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