Mortgage rates hiked and products temporarily withdrawn by lenders

Britain’s biggest building society is hiking some fixed mortgage rates for new borrowing from Friday, while another major lender has temporarily removed some products.

Nationwide Building Society said it needed to increase fixed rates to ensure they remain sustainable, while HSBC UK said it had temporarily removed some products so it can “stay within operational capacity”.

Nationwide is increasing selected fixed-rate deals for new borrowing as well as reducing some rates on trackers. The changed rates for new mortgage business will be effective from Friday.

A Nationwide spokesperson said: “In recent weeks swap rates (which underpin the pricing of fixed-rate mortgages) have continued to rise and lenders across the market have increased rates or withdrawn products.

“We are not immune to this and need to increase our fixed rates to ensure they remain sustainable.”

Meanwhile, HSBC UK advised brokers on Thursday afternoon that it had temporarily removed its “new business” residential and buy-to-let products.

All products and rates for existing customers are still available, the bank said, adding that it continues to review the situation regularly.

An HSBC spokesperson said: “To ensure that we can stay within our operational capacity and meet our customer service commitments, we occasionally need to limit the amount of new business we can take each day.

“Our broker products will be available again on Monday, June 12.”

Among Nationwide’s changes, it said two, three and five-year fixed-rate deals for people with a 5% deposit will increase by between 0.01 and 0.20 percentage points, with rates starting from 4.69%.

Financial information website Moneyfacts said it has seen several mortgage providers hiking rates over the past week.

On Thursday, the average two-year-fixed-rate mortgage rate on the market across all deposit brackets was 5.82%, according to Moneyfacts’ figures, up from 5.49% at the start of June.

The average five-year fixed-rate mortgage on the market on Thursday was 5.49%, up from 5.17% on June 1.

Responding to HSBC UK’s announcements on website Newspage, Riz Malik, founder and director at Southend-on-Sea-based R3 Mortgages, said: “I saw the announcement whilst at lunch and it really underscored the turbulent times we’re currently facing in the mortgage market.”

Jamie Lennox, director at Norwich-based Dimora Mortgages, said on the website: “More needs to be done by lenders to give a minimum of 24 hours to brokers to allow reasonable time for consumers to consider their options.”