The Financial Conduct Authority’s mortgage-lending statistics for the first quarter of 2023 recorded £14.9 billion of outstanding balances on loans with arrears. That figure was 9.5% higher than in the previous quarter and 12.5% higher than a year earlier. It accounted for 0.89% of outstanding mortgage balances, up from 0.81% in the preceding quarter.
The definition is essential. In this release, arrears meant contractual payments missed equivalent to at least 1.5% of the outstanding mortgage balance, or a property being in possession. The £14.9 billion represented the outstanding balances of loans meeting that definition; it was not a statement that £14.9 billion of payments had been missed.
The reporting population also has limits. The data covered regulated mortgage lending and non-regulated lending by firms undertaking regulated mortgage lending or administration. It should not be casually substituted for a different organisation’s measure of the number of buy-to-let accounts in arrears.
A wider lending snapshot
The release reported gross mortgage advances of £58.8 billion in the quarter, down 23.6% on the first quarter of 2022. New commitments, representing lending agreed for the coming months, were £48.9 billion. The buy-to-let share of gross advances was 9.8%. These measures describe activity and composition, rather than the performance of an individual landlord.
The FCA identified these as historical quarterly statistics, not seasonally adjusted business-flow figures. A comparison with a later release therefore needs to preserve the same definitions and coverage.
How to compare arrears headlines
Our editorial approach is to put the threshold, unit and denominator next to the headline. Is the measure a number of accounts, the balance of affected loans or the amount overdue? Does it cover homeowners, landlords or a combined reporting population? Is the change quarterly or annual?
Those questions can explain why two reports give different percentages without either being arithmetically wrong. This archive retains the FCA’s first-quarter 2023 scope. It does not establish current arrears levels or repeat the imported story’s separate comparison between landlord and homeowner accounts as though it were the same dataset.