Can a bank change your mortgage rate?

It's difficult to tell without seeing your mortgage agreement and the letter that you've been sent.

In general mortgage lenders usually reserve the right to recall the loan at any time. In this case they may be doing this and offering a new loan at a significantly worse rate.

If I were in your situation (I'm on base + 0.6% from Abbey at the moment but they show no signs of changing that.) I would get in touch with Barclays and confirm that this is indeed what they intend to do. If it is then I would take advice from Citizen's Advice or try and get one of the newspaper's financial pages interested in your story. A whiff of bad publicity for the bank might work to your advantage.

Tracker deals usually (though not always) come to a natural end after a length of time which is agreed at entry, even though the term of the mortgage may be longer, and the default on expiry is to be put on the lenders standard rate. Could this be what is happening in your case?

Is the new rate really calculated (i.e. described to you) as base+4%, or is it simply the lenders standard rate, which just happens to be 4.5% at the moment?

Read your mortgage contract. That will tell you if they can do this.

Rob Graham

and don't bother looking at the large print, it will be in the very smallest.

Thanks Rob, I have to give them a call and see what's going on. I'll post anything interesting.

Thanks Rob,

I had overreacted to a badly written letter. The letter was regarding the current account linked to the mortgage account. It used a term "The Woowich Standard Variable Rate" which I took to mean my mortgage rate, but in fact it's the current account rate.

Thanks for respondng.

Glad it sorted OK. I think sometimes firms send letters with subsidiary information which does not actually apply to the recipient, but can alarm them.

Rob