Ms Derville Rowland:

An entitlement to a tracker can arise from a lot of circumstances and has arisen from lots of circumstances, not on the face of the contract and not on the face of any other document representing the contract terms. What we recognised is that in complicated situations where people might have an expectation of getting a tracker mortgage at a point in time from what was done or said, they should have the benefit of that protection. Neither what is written down on that document or what is written down in a contract would have served the expectation for those customers. That is what we mean when we talk about the transparency obligations. We mean what advertisements might have said or circumstances in which, in an engagement with a member of staff of a bank, a customer was given an idea that he or she might get a tracker later. When we were looking at the tracker issue, we looked at all of those kinds of things to inform us in terms of the factors that go into a customer journey at a point in time. We looked at what they could have reasonably understood to help them in their decision making at the time. This would be details written on the front sheet, details written in the contract and things that were done and said through advertisements or engagements with customers. We take all of those matters into account.

Separately, on the content of the front cover sheets, that is, the key information that is present in a contract and has to complied with under the Consumer Credit Act 1995, if that gives rise to a tracker mortgage issue, of course we would look at that. However, that information may not give rise to a tracker mortgage issue for the reasons that I have explained. It is true that the key information for a customer should be on the front of that document but it has been our experience that we had to go wider when we were looking at tracker mortgages to make sure we felt everyone had been dealt with fairly. It could be that there is an error in those documents.