What do mortgage companies have to do legally to help customers before reposession?

[Hollyoaks]

My dh and I have a fixed rate mortgage which we recently fixed for three years just before the interest rates took a dive . We're not going to have the opportunity to change this till 2011 so stuck with a large monthly payment.

Dh is self-employed and works in the construction industry, 4 years ago when we organised this mortgage business was booming and we had no reason to worry. Now that business is extremely scarce and dh's average wage is about a third of what it was we are struggling to pay our bills. I am going to ring our mortgage lender later today to try and put some of our mortgage on interest only to reduce the payment slightly and give us some breathing space. They have already refused to put it all on interest only or give is a payment holiday. We also cannot rebroke our mortgage as we have no equity in the house and there are no 100% mortgages available.

So do lenders have a legal obligation to help in certain ways before customers start to miss payments, repossession?

Any mortgage brokers, financial advisers, anyone who has any ideas about?????????

Any help before I make the phone call?

Hi Hollyoaks. Didn't want you to go unanswered. Found this Not read it so not sure how useful it is. Hope it helpe.

Thanks Tinker, I've been Googling this all morning but couldn't find anything, maybe I was using the wrong search words? This is really useful and gives me more of an idea about how it all works and a good starting point for more research. I know nothing about mortgages .

I have called my lender and they can only switch to interest only if I had at least 20% equity in my house which we don't, only being on repayment for 9 months with no initial deposit. So, I'm awaiting a phonecall from their money management team next week to discuss our options. Will just have to wait and see.

Thanks again for your response.