What's an Agreement in Principle?
An AiP lets you know whether we’d be willing, in principle, to offer you a mortgage for a certain amount.
It doesn't involve a hard credit check, so it won’t affect your credit score.
When you’re ready to apply, you can book an appointment online with one of our mortgage advisers.
Agreement in Principle FAQ
If there's no change to the details you've given us about your income, regular spending, and any debts you might have, your AiP will last for 90 days. It's a good idea to complete another AiP if any of those details or your circumstances change because it could affect your AiP outcome.
An AiP doesn’t guarantee that you can get a mortgage with us, but it will let you know whether we'd be willing to lend the amount you need. If you apply for a mortgage, we'll check your income, credit history and financial circumstances, and consider whether you can afford the mortgage payments both now and in the future.
You might still be able to get an AiP even if you've had some money problems in the past. Depending on your circumstances, we might need to speak to you before we offer you an AiP. You can visit our mortgage lending rules page for more information.
When you apply for a mortgage, we'll ask for detailed information about your credit history. Factors that could affect your ability to get a mortgage include:
- Having a bankruptcy order within the past 6 years
- A County Court Judgment for debt that you haven't repaid within the past 6 years
- Being turned down for a mortgage or having a home repossessed in the past 6 years
- Having less than 3 months' employment history.
We’re committed to protecting your personal data. We’ll use your information for a few different purposes – for example, to manage your accounts, to provide our products and services to you and others and to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. We may also share your information with our trusted third parties for these purposes. You can read more detailed information on the how and why we use your information page, including the rights in relation to your personal data, and our legal grounds for using it.
To process your application, we’ll supply your personal information to credit reference agencies and fraud prevention agencies, and they will give us information about you, such as about your financial history. We do this to assess creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace, and recover debts and prevent criminal activity. These agencies may in turn share your personal information with other organisations. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance or employment. Once you open an account with us, we will share account data with the credit reference agencies on an ongoing basis.
If false or inaccurate information is provided to us and fraud is identified, details may be passed to credit reference and fraud prevention agencies to prevent fraud and money laundering and to verify your identity.
The Credit Reference Agency Information Notice (CRAIN) describes how the three main credit reference agencies in the UK each use and share personal data. The CRAIN is available on the credit reference agencies’ websites.
See more on how these agencies might use your information.
You can ask us for a copy of any of the documents or information mentioned above.
You can also check our full mortgage range [PDF, 317KB] to see if our other mortgages are suitable for you, download our tariff of mortgage charges [PDF, 265KB] and read our legal information.
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