Apparently the Council of Mortgage Lenders has seen new amendments to the EU’s mortgage directive which could exempt buy to let mortgages. The European Parliament’s Internal Markets and Consumer Protection committee recently published its report on the proposals, and agrees with the CML that the regulations should not be uniform right across different consumer groups and products.

The IMCO report also suggests that some of the current obligations by lenders could be relaxed. These include not having to let mortgage applicants know why they have been rejected, as well as the requirement that advice should be given covering a wide range of products, so that consumers could be informed if the advice only covers a limited number of products.

This would allow lenders to continue to offer advice based solely on their own products, whereas the directive seemed to infer that they would have to offer advice on their rival’s products as well, or could not offer any advice at all. The IMCO’s findings will be debated and voted on in the European Parliament during the coming months. The news that amendments have been put forward has to be good news, even though there was never any need for them to be included in the first place as buy to let mortgages are effectively a commercial transaction.