Maternity leave - apply for mortgage

[Oregano20]

Hello everyone

I'm in the middle of applying for a mortgage. We live in Scotland, so an offer on our dream house has been accepted. All the paperwork for the mortgage is in, including all my old payslips and a financial reference. But I'm on maternity leave until June. Understandably, the bank needs proof of my return to work, and my new part time salary.

I have a manager who is 1 year in to the role and has shown several times to be incompetent (by failing to submitting my mat leave to HR until a couple of weeks to go, and another manager ended up doing it, for example)

I asked him to submit my new part time hours to HR. He told me this probably wasnt possible and they would send me a pro rata financial record. I told him I needed the exact salary for the new hours. He made some calls, he told me email hr and tell them I'm going down to 20 hours and ask for a new financial statement.

So, obviously, they've come back to working days later to say they can only send me what's in their HR system.

I work for a really well known, huge company, should this be so difficult? I thinking my next move is to call my manager and calmly say, please get me someone else to help me or I will report you to HR. But what do you guys think?

I'm so worried, I've already lost 9 days since I originally tried to get him to help me

[Pinkdungerees]

I hope you may have reached a resolution by now but if not I would either email HR and CC him in plus his manager and lay it all out in writing what needs to happen. I have done this myself when a manager wasn’t ‘getting round’ to important things and it’s amazing how quickly they then responded once I had gently brought it to their manager’s attention.
Or otherwise go over his head to someone above him, you can always apologise for any inconvenience but explain it’s time sensitive and so needs to be completed by someone with capacity to respond quickly

Hope you get it sorted and all the best for your dream move!

[Oregano20]

Thanks so much. In the end I escalated to my managers manager, and was told that the company completely refuses any kind of letter or otherwise to suggest future hours. I don't know what hours I can get until I go back :(

My mortgage broker said this is highly unusual of a company to refuse

[Aprilx]

I think you posted this in another forum as well. As I understood your new hours have not been formally agreed yet and although you believe this won’t be an issue, your manager did not want to commit at this point. I agree with them, I would not put in writing new made up hours without actually having gone through the process of agreeing to those hours.

The answer, as explained in the other thread was to simply provide confirmation of your current contractual hours. You have unnecessarily over complicated things by even mentioning a future state that has not even been agreed yet. If the mortgage broker won’t accept this, then I would start again with a different one and simply provide your current contract.

[Oregano20]

Yes I wish I had just put my full hours in my application. But if you don't know something, you don't know something. I thought you had to disclose if you knew you'd be dropping hours.

I tried telling my mortgage broker to go back and change it to full time, he said he's not come across a company that wasnt able to assist.

I'm not asking for special treatment, my employer has so many different patterns of part time hours, so I'm not really making anything up, I know the contract I want and it will be available in the summer.

[Aprilx]

@Oregano20

Yes I wish I had just put my full hours in my application. But if you don't know something, you don't know something. I thought you had to disclose if you knew you'd be dropping hours.

I tried telling my mortgage broker to go back and change it to full time, he said he's not come across a company that wasnt able to assist.

I'm not asking for special treatment, my employer has so many different patterns of part time hours, so I'm not really making anything up, I know the contract I want and it will be available in the summer.

I think the technical point is that your reduction in hours has not been agreed, so you don’t “know” it for sure.

I think your mortgage broker is not understanding that your new hours have not been formalised. Either that or he is not very good with employment law or law. Because I would definitely not put this in writing to you before it had been formally agreed. If I did but then the formal review concluded you could not go part time after all, as your manager has indicated, you have this letter and could reasonably say it constitutes an agreement.

[Oregano20]

So the bank has accepted a note from my broker of my proposed hours for when I return. So thank goodness it's sorted.

Live and learn