Professor Philip Lane:

Over the whole tracker mortgage period, from the early 2000s onwards, clearly there were waves where individual banks might have been pushing certain products. Competition was pretty intense in the mortgage market in the mid-2000s. There is a lot of volatility in this area. A bank might offer a product for a while and might then become overexposed in respect of a certain type of loan and pull back, at which point other lenders come in. Those are the market dynamics of the credit market. One cannot say, therefore, that all lenders can have a fixed set of products that they offer at all times.