The audience member had explained she was in the process of getting a mortgage as a first time buyer, and had initially been told her interest rate would be 4.5%, only to be told the lender had pulled that offer, and that the best offer she could get would be about 10.5%.  She reported what she had “been told” she might expect and a number she had “been given” while getting her paperwork together for the application.  She described “four offers”, none of which was now available. When pressed on the reasons why the offers were no longer available she said she had been told only that they had been pulled.  The complainants suggested no lenders were offering such rates and the comments were unfair to the mortgage industry.

The ECU considered viewers would have understood this was a comment from an audience member on their own situation rather than an undisputed fact and judged it accordingly.  At the time of broadcast there was a high degree of financial uncertainty following a mini-budget which had led to a spike in borrowing costs and a number of mortgage lenders withdrawing and repricing their products.  The general sense viewers would have taken from the question was that this economic turbulence was having an effect on mortgage rates, with particularly sharp consequences for first-time buyers – a position broadly supported by the facts.

Whilst it would be unusual for four formal mortgage applications to have been made, as the contributor claimed, she may have meant to refer to illustrations of offers.  Either way, in the ECU’s view a question about how financial uncertainty was affecting an individual would be unlikely to mislead viewers about rates available to people across the UK.  The programme also included the response of the Government Minister on the panel and from the chair who asked to hear more about her case since the figures represented “an extraordinary jump”. In the context of a fast-flowing debate, in the ECU’s view this provided sufficient challenge to a statement which may not have been strictly accurate in all particulars.
Not Upheld