The Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI) has been encouraged by the recent failure of interest-only mortgage legal claims.

The trade body says the last few months have been encouraging in that a number of cases have terminated in the final weeks before commencement of court hearings. In addition, AMI says there have been three cases which provide evidence that it is acorrect to defend these claims.

The results in Ross and Ross versus Attanta Limited; Collett and Collett versus APF Private Clients Limited; and Colborn and Colborn versus Albany Park Limited all provide support to the broker position.

AMI continues to work with its members to provide information and support to ensure that these are defended, where appropriate, in a fair but robust manner.  It says that all firms should ensure they engage their PI insurer early and those not in membership of AMI are encouraged to consider joining to benefit from the information and support on these critical cases.

Robert Sinclair, chief executive of AMI, said: “These decisions strike out the cases as being time barred.  In addition, the courts in delivering their judgements have also considered many of the substantive issues under review.  These broadly have reduced the amounts of claim substantially, established that they have limited or no merit, set out that the costs of court time outweigh potential benefit and challenge the quality of both the claimant evidence and expert witness work.

“AMI continues to work to inform FCA, FOS and the SRA on these results. We are encouraged that firms might be able to recover their costs from the claimants as they mostly are insured.”