An eminent consumer affairs expert in the UK spoke yesterday of how he had warned his clients of the impending mortgage “ticking bomb” as long ago as last Autumn.

He also expressed surprise that mortgage advisors who are now scrambling to find new fixed rate deals didn’t act more proactively at the time.

The Chancellor told Parliament yesterday that the Government was not about to provide support for those who have seen the interest rate on the two-year fixed rate mortgages more than treble in the past three months.

A number of City analysts believe that an unwelcome side effect of the Pandemic has been that there has been a growing reliance on Government support. The public has become used to schemes like “eat out to help out” and seeing the property market supported by stamp duty holidays.

Unfortunately, the current mortgage crisis is little more than a tough fact of economic life. Interest rates do go up as well as down, a detail that has become lost on members of the public who have travelled through half of their “mortgage journey” never having experienced a single rate hike, let alone a series of them.

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