Intelligent Finance (IF), the online arm of Halifax, the UK’s biggest lender, has come under fire for cashing in on last week’s interest rate rise.

The lender, which specialises in mortgages offset directly against the borrower’s income, is about to impose an increase in its standard variable rate (SVR) of 0.35 percentage points, 0.1 more than the quarter-point base-rate rise. All IF customers will have to pay the new rate from tomorrow.

Nick Gardner, of Chase de Vere, the independent mortgage broker, said: “There is no excuse for lenders using a base rate rise to improve their margins, and we see it far too often. It is not why the Bank of England makes these interest rate decisions.”

The home loans offered by IF allow borrowers to offset their savings and any credit balance in their current account against the capital owed on their home.

A homeowner with, for example, a £200,000 mortgage and £15,000 in savings will see their monthly repayments increase by £42 a month, or £504, a year after the rate rise has taken effect.

Halifax’s IF borrowers would have found themselves nearly £150 a year better off had the lender passed on only the quarter-point rise.

David McIntosh, of Intelligent Finance, said: “We are a business and we have to look at our pricing.”

Many homeowners have taken shelter from rate rises by taking up fixed-rate deals, but nearly 20 per cent of borrowers locked into tracker rate mortgages are guaranteed to see their rates rise by a quarter point next month. Most lenders that announced new SVRs last week passed on the full 0.25 percentage point rise to borrowers.

First-time buyers have no protection from rate rises, however, and many are now rethinking their ambitions.

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