Mortgage hell hits: Londoners face up to the rate rises

Finances crippled, weddings postponed, equity wiped out and having the dream of owning a first home snatched away. Charlotte Duck speaks to a few of the many people with life plans left in tatters by the mortgage rate rises

STEVEN BREWIS has already put his wedding off three times, and thanks to rising interest rates he’s now considering it once more. We’ve postponed our wedding because of Covid and we’re thinking about doing it again because it’s hard to justify paying out for it if the mortgage is going up so much.”

He’s just one of thousands of Londoners now facing housing peril with their life plans in tatters after lenders’ mortgage rates soared following the Government’s mini-budget. Despite Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s U-turn on abolishing the 45p rate of tax, mortgage rates are not forecast to fall.

As with many people set to come off a low, fixed-rate mortgage, Brewis, 49, has found his repayments are skyrocketing. Even on my decent wage, it’s going to cripple us,” he admits. He works in data science and digital health, and lives in a four-bedroom house in Chipping Ongar, Essex, with his fiancée, Rosanna, and their two children.

He has a 400,000 mortgage, for which he currently pays 780 a month, and he’s worked out that this will shoot up to 1,980 a month if the rate goes up to six per cent as predicted. Brewis grew up in the East End in the Eighties and Nineties and remembers his parents struggling with their payments when the rates were 15.5 per cent. We nearly lost our home,” he says.

“I used to hear my mum crying about how she couldn’t afford the mortgage, and it resonates now.”