A homeowner with stage three cancer is worried his house will be repossessed after interest rates were raised in a bid to curb inflation.

The Bank of England pushed up interest rates to five per cent from 4.5 per cent on Thursday in order to quell inflation, a move which is set to cause more pain for mortgage holders.

While the bulk of mortgaged homeowners are on fixed-rate deals, meaning they will not immediately feel an impact but they will feel the “pain” when they come to remortgage, those on tracker mortgages will feel the immediate impacts of the 0.5 per cent per cent increase.

Nicholas Wilson, who is on a standard variable rate mortgage, said he is going to challenge his mortgage because he thinks “the whole thing is a scam”.

The 66-year-old, from Hastings, is a mortgage prisoner, the term given to homeowners who typically took out a mortgage before 2008, whose mortgage was sold to an inactive lender, who have paid a high interest rate for 15 years, and now cannot remortgage because of the changed affordability tests.


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He is now at a point where his mortgage equals his pension.

“Last year, my mortgage was about £440 (per month), it’s now over £900 – every time the bank puts the interest rates up, my mortgage goes up,” said the anti-corruption campaigner.

“I’m stuck in this mortgage and I obviously can’t go elsewhere. I do get donations from some of my followers, which just about tides me over, but that’s not going to be sustainable any longer.”

Mr Wilson was diagnosed with stage three prostate cancer in October of last year, which has required him to regularly go to the hospital for radiotherapy and said that while contending with cancer, he worries about dealing with potential repossession proceedings.

“I can’t contemplate repossession; I don’t know what I’d do if it came to that,” he said.

Mr Wilson does not believe the rise in interest rates will reduce inflation.

“[The Bank of England] has raised it 13 times now and it still hasn’t gone down,” he said.

“There’s going to be millions of people facing repossession… it’s just going to be a disaster.

“In my case, I’m going to challenge this mortgage because I think the whole thing is a scam.”