Mr. Colm Kincaid:

I thank the Deputy for the question and I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak here today. We are very much alive to the challenges that the individuals Deputy Doherty mentioned are facing. To the forefront of my concern at the moment is not just mortgage credit but credit generally. About one in three households have a mortgage and I know we will focus a bit on mortgages. However, many consumers are facing into the situation of having to access other forms of credit, including high-cost credit, which they might not have had to access before because of their budgets. I know the Deputy is very much alive to that as well. Across a range of fronts, the impact of the cost-of-living challenges on consumers of financial services is absolutely to the forefront of our mind and our work programme for this year. I want to preface with that.

Turning specifically to mortgages, I will spend a minute or two talking about what we have done to get the system ready for this. We have focused on two areas within our mandate. One is on affordability and the other is on switching. Going back to 2020 and 2021, we renewed our focus with lenders on getting them to up their game in terms of resources, engagement plans, the suite of solutions and the analysis that they had in place on mortgage arrears so that they are better positioned to anticipate and deal with mortgage arrears, particularly focusing on long-term mortgage arrears, which are some of the most difficult cases to tackle. Last year long-term mortgage arrears, LTMA, fell below 25,000 for the first time. I focus on that because they were some of the ones where these more innovative solutions needed to be found. We are coming into this with a system that should be better prepared than in the past to anticipate and deal with cases of arrears, including pre-arrears and including consumers who, exactly as the Deputy said, are facing into that situation where they simply do not know how they will manage that.