Foundation Home Loans has become the latest lender to temporarily suspend all new applications.

It is making the move today (31 March 2020) in response to the continuing Covid-19 crisis.

Hans Geberbauer, chief executive of Foundation Home Loans, said: “This allows us to focus resources on delivering support, including mortgage payment holiday arrangements, to our 38,000 existing borrowers. With this in mind, and given the current situation with valuations, we have also taken the decision to put all pre-offer applications on hold.

“In order to focus all our efforts on providing mortgage payment holidays and with the suspension of new applications, we will furlough a number of our staff under the Government’s COVID-19 Job Retention programme. We are asking these employees not to work during April, during which time we can we can re-evaluate our product offering in this fast-changing environment.

“As we will furlough a number of staff, advisers’ normal Foundation contacts may not be available during April and they should therefore use our central helpline if they need to contact us.

“These decisions have not been taken lightly but we believe they are necessary; we will be doing all we can to assist both our staff and all our intermediary partners during these challenging times.”