For Steven, a media consultant from Guildford, and his wife, the remortgaging nightmare is only beginning. “People like me can’t sleep at night – it’s horrendous,” he says. “The mortgage for our three-bed cottage is up for renewal in December. We’ve geared our lives around the low interest rates of the past 13 years. I am the only earner in the family. If interest rates hit 6%, I’ll have to find an extra £1,480 per month – well over double what we pay now. That is totally catastrophic for our family, absolutely terrifying.”
The UK is experiencing the sharpest, fastest rise in interest rates since the 1980s, and markets and homeowners are having to digest yet another increase from the Bank of England, which raised rates by another 0.5 percentage points to 5% on Thursday to a 15-year high.
