More than a million people in the past three years may have taken out mortgages that will continue past the state pension age and could lead to problems in retirement.
Figures obtained from the Bank of England by Sir Steve Webb, the former Liberal Democrat pensions minister, show that today’s mortgage crisis has caused more people to take longer-term loans in an effort to reduce and to stretch out their payments.
A total of 294,243 post-retirement age mortgages were taken out in the fourth quarters of 2021, 2022 and 2023 combined. Extrapolating this figure for three full years, Webb said that more than 1.1 million borrowers could have taken out these mortgages since 2021. This would leave them paying off home loans after they had