As many struggle to meet their mortgage repayments amid rising interest rates and the cost-of-living crisis, lenders insist they’ll give a helping hand if needed.

But as Broadstairs writer, dominatrix and KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd discovers, the support promised isn’t as forthcoming as the banks would have you believe...

“My wife had Covid the week before last. She didn’t work, so didn’t get paid. I rang my bank today to ask for a month’s break. The first time I’ve ever asked them for any help, any flexibility. First, I had to fill out a budget planner online: all my finances laid bare to see if I could afford to be let off paying my mortgage for a month. Oh, in these days of austerity, they claim we can contact them and they will help. But they make it so difficult that people give up and continue trying to pay.

“Just add one payment on to the end of my mortgage, that’s all I ask. They’ll benefit from it! It’s more interest payments for them, and me hooked in longer. So why am I made to feel like I’m humbling begging for a favour? It’s humiliating, the way I’ve been treated. I’m desperate for a break and they’re asking how much I spend on soap!”

Jason is one of many people struggling to meet higher mortgage payments. 1.4 million of us will see our fixed rates come to an end in 2023, often fixed at around 2%, now more likely to come in at about 6%, which represents £100s extra suddenly needed to be found in already tight budgets.

“Too many people are struggling, there aren’t enough staff to cope, so many get stuck in an impersonal Kafkaesque bureaucratic loop...”

Every month, about 700,000 households miss a rent or mortgage payment. It’s a figure that’s bound to increase, and represents many millions of family members’ stories, all involving untold fear, shame, sleepless nights.

In June the government set up a “mortgage charter” in conjunction with Britain’s biggest lenders, to allow some flexibility for customers as interest rates continue to climb to ever more alarming heights. It promises that customers can contact their lenders for support without it affecting their credit score, and switch to an interest-only deal or extend their mortgage term where needed. Sounds great, right? Not enough, but a promising beginning. Unfortunately, people are struggling to access even these limited promises of help. Too many people are struggling, there aren’t enough staff to cope, so many get stuck in an impersonal Kafkaesque bureaucratic loop.

Institutions rely on people being too ashamed and exhausted by bureaucracy to pursue their rights. The student loans company has been adopting similar practices for years, suddenly announcing you’ve only a few days to demonstrate your low income or entitlement to benefits before they take a whopping great lump out of your bank account.

The benefits system, too, remains ludicrously complicated, requiring so many impossibly difficult stages to be completed that people simply give up on obtaining the funds to which they’re rightfully entitled. It’s been estimated £19 billion of benefits support goes unclaimed every year. £19 billion! If you haven’t limitless patience, strength, time, emotional and practical resources, you’re bound to surrender before the faceless administrative juggernaut that makes up our welfare system.

And Jason? After a good rant, and several hours spent hanging on the phone, then filling in reams of intrusive online forms - exactly what you need with a sick wife in need of care, and after a full day at work - he decided to give up, and manage some other way. Credit card, perhaps, or loan shark: anything had to be better than this.

His mortgage company made him suffer all the same, and imagine it was somehow his fault he was in this monstrous, utterly predictable position. It isn’t good enough.