I represented a client recently who was awarded low rate attendance allowance for an indefinite period by a Tribunal.

This now means that he is entitled to pension guarentee credit plus housing costs plus full savings credit.

So far so good, but he wants to increase his mortgage from £15000 to £85000 in order to move to a bungalow that will be more suitable to his disability needs.

As far as I can see, there should be no problem as Sch 2 para 10 specifically allows for such an increase, but he can not find a lender who will take that on board. Even brokers who boast of taking on "problem cases" are very shy indeed.

Has anyone had any experience of this?

The increase client requires has to be substantiated by his income, if a lender borrows this amount and the client is unable to keep up with the repayments for whatever reason (affordability, future rate increases), the client can complain and as the Financial Services authority will be regulating mortgage advice very shortly, lenders and brokers are wary of this and have to register to give mortgage advice and thus can ill afford to be the root for future complaints against them for fear of being struck off, fines or imprisonment or both. A person can borrow usually 3.5 times a person income unless he goes self cert but this can be classed as fraud if person is not self employed.

Due to the housing boom and the time it has taken to find someone who would do self cert he has now had to increase it to £96k, but he has managed to get a broker to arrange that amount at an interest rate of 5.9%