I am a debt adviser, and my experience tells me that even if you paid into it, you can’t rely on the state support process any more
One minute, everything’s fine; you have a job, a girlfriend, a mortgage and a life. Then something happens that threatens all of it. You get a hernia. I’m a debt adviser and work with people who face life-destroying levels of debt, and this is one of the cases I’ve worked on over the years.
Jake, a fortysomething tradesperson, had been paying off his mortgage arrears for years. He was in fact a “mortgage prisoner”, unable to switch, and his mortgage had been sold to a high-interest charging company. After a year of steady payments, the company allowed Jake to capitalise the remaining arrears with a new mortgage product in October 2021.