We’d like to bring to your awareness that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have announced additional guidance on payment holidays designed to help customers whose income continues to be impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

This will mean that:

  • Customers can continue to apply for a payment holiday until 31st October 2020.
  • Customers who have already arranged a payment holiday can request an additional three months payment holiday – providing a maximum break of 6 months.
  • Customers wishing to extend their payment holiday must wait until the initial holiday has come to an end before arranging an extension.
  • Customers who can afford to pay their mortgage in full shouldn’t consider a payment holiday – due to the long term impact on the amount they will pay.
  • Customers on a payment holiday should think about making reduced payments towards their mortgage, to minimise the long term impact on the amount they will pay – if they can afford to do so.

NatWest customers can manage their mortgage payment holiday online through Mortgage Self Service (MSS), they can arrange an initial holiday or an additional break on the website – as long as the first holiday period has come to an end.

Once the initial holiday has finished, we’ll write to the customer explaining their options in full.  Our NatWest, RBS and Ulster customer websites have been updated to reflect the various options available to support our customers.

Should you have any questions relating to Mortgage Payment Holidays, please visit our coronavirus hub.

During these unprecedented times, like many lenders we at NatWest Intermediary Solutions have adapted a multitude of our policies and offerings recently.

To make things easier for you we have created a ‘coronavirus hub’ where we store all our updates relating to policy and process changes during the coronavirus outbreak. You can stay up to date by visiting our coronavirus hub here.

We’d like to also provide a short summary of just some of the aspects of our proposition that have changed since the outbreak:

Self Employed Customers

We have also changed how we assess self-employed income. This applies to Residential and Buy to Let customers where an affordability assessment would be completed.

We require the completion of a supplementary information sheet as part of the required packaging when submitting a self-employed new business application.

When assessing affordability you must use the lower of:

  • The average of the last two years net profit
  • The most recent years profit
  • The confirmed government income support amount

Employed Customers

Since the start of April we have amended our guidance in relation to the evidence we require for employed customer’s income. Please visit our coronavirus hub for more information and we also provide customer scenarios to help any queries you may have.

Offer Extensions

To help provide peace of mind to customers we have adapted our offer extension process. Where customers are one month from their offer expiring and need an extension by up to 3 months you can contact us on their behalf to request the extension. The offer extension form can be found in our forms and guides section. Here you’ll also find our New Build offer extension form.

Valuations

Physical valuations have now resumed in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and are due to resume in Scotland on the 29th June, and we are now 90% through our valuations backlog in England. We have also been undertaking AVMs and desktop valuations and have created this useful guide to explain the different valuations that we conduct.

Payment Holidays

We are committed to helping customers through this difficult time and this includes offering mortgage payment holidays, so far we have processed over 230,000 mortgage payment holidays for our customers.

Our Service

We remain committed to providing the high levels of service that you expect from us. Our knowledgeable Business Development Managers, dedicated support teams and LiveTALK agents are still there to help you.  To keep up to date with our service levels, please access them here.