Ghost estates: houses occupied by mortgage holders in otherwise unfinished estates across the country have been particularly badly hit by negative equity

The Financial Regulator has no plans to revise its regular bulletins on mortgage arrears despite renewed claims that the figures it collects and endorses from 22 home-loan lenders seriously understate the amount of debt stress facing Irish householders.


The regulator's latest quarterly update, which will be published in the coming weeks, will again only include households that have skipped monthly payments for three months or more and not include all households facing mortgage-repayment stress because their banks had switched them in recent times to paying interest-only home loans.


Michael Dowling, a senior director at the Independent Mortgage Advisers Federation, said he was disappointed to learn that the regulator had no plans to alter the format of its mortgage-arrears report because he said the current bulletins "underestimated by about half" the numbers facing difficulties in paying their mortgages.


The regulator's last set of figures published in early March showed only 3.6% of 28,603 households had failed to pay their mortgage payments for more than 90 days by the end of the last year, suggesting that household mortgages worth €5.3bn were in arrears.


But Dowling said the banks' own figures suggest that at least another 30,000 households had been switched by their lenders to pay interest-only mortgages from paying both capital and the interest and that the true level of mortgage debt in Ireland was consequently much higher than the regulator's figures would suggest.


A spokesman for the Financial Regulator said there were no plans plans to alter the current format of the information published on arrears and repossessions. "Data on types of mortgages or those in negative equity is not requested as our focus is on arrears and repossessions. We receive data from 22 lenders, including subprime, on a quarterly basis.


"All data provided is checked and verified with institutions and by the Financial Regulator.


"We do not provide any further breakdown of the information other than what is published as this could lead to some institutions being identified. We cannot provide details of the information submitted to the Financial Regulator by institutions as this is submitted on a confidential basis," the spokesman said.


Last month, the regulator said that a review of all mortgage lenders had found that banks and building societies "had better practices for managing arrears" than other types of mortgage lenders.