Mortgage redress delays slammed

A year-long delay in compensating tracker mortgage holders who were penalised or overcharged is “not acceptable”, TDs have said.

The criticism comes as Bank of Ireland claimed it will begin paying redress and compensation “within weeks” to more than 4,200 customers who had been overcharged in recent years.

Speaking to an Oireachtas committee yesterday, retail boss Liam McLoughlin said the bank had identified 602 customers as part of an industry-wide review who had been wrongly denied a cheap mortgage that tracks the European Central Bank (ECB) benchmark rate.

However, committee members criticised the slow pace of progress. Sinn Féin’s Finance spokesman Pearse Doherty told the Irish Examiner: “While we have seen some progress, the bank has been so slow in delivering on the tracker issue. It is like déjà vu.”.

The bank said in documents provided to the committee that an additional 3,654 tracker-rate customers had been overcharged by an average of 0.15%.

That is compared to a figure of 3,916 accounts last December when the bank admitted the issue of some customers not being on the rate specified in loan documentation.

“We have put the customers back on the right rate. Over the next number of months we will be engaging with those customers in terms of remedy and compensation,” Mr McLoughlin said, adding that the process “will kick off within weeks”.

Bank of Ireland said earlier this year it had put aside an initial €25m to cover its costs in relation to the issue.

The Central Bank ordered the State’s mortgage lenders to carry out a probe in late 2015 of cases where customers had been wrongfully denied their contractual rights to an ECB tracker rate .