ME Group, the legal tech business, has asked MPs for help in encouraging regulatory bodies to speed up thousands of claims for mortgage mis-selling and mortgage overpayments.

In its submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry by the All Party Mortgage Prisoners Group, ME Group says that it’s specialist subsidiary firms have carried out extensive assessments on mis-sold mortgages for more than 43,000 UK households and found that over 18,000 of these may be due compensation of more than £20,000, adding up to a potential compensation bill of at least £3.6bn.

ME Group CEO Rob Cooper said: “While the focus for this inquiry is 150,000 (FCA estimate) mortgage prisoners, we believe a significant proportion have also been either mis-sold their mortgage or have been overcharged, although many people who fall into these categories do not even know that they have been mis-sold.

“Many of those customers have become mortgage prisoners now because they were mis-sold not once, but repeatedly, by mortgage brokers revisiting their accounts and “churning” them to the extent that they are now over-indebted with no equity in their property. Once they have been identified, mis-sold customers should be able to claim for compensation via the FSCS and the FOS. The principle and practice of compensation for financial services mis-selling is already well-established, so there is no need for policy intervention or new regulation.

“The government must encourage regulatory authorities to move the mortgage mis-selling issue up their agenda, and to build internal capability to examine these types of claim and make settlement decisions much more quickly than is currently the case.”

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