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  This is revealed in todays Sunday Times. Gordon Brown is asking the FSA to ban providers from offering 100% mortgages.
  
  Mortgages have always been only a small part of my business and in a full year, even at their peak, I have done no more than about a dozen. But I have been doing this professionally for 20 years now. I have never recommended a 125% loan but a few times I have recommended a 100% mortgage, though I have to say it was a long time ago and well before the price boom that has now 'busted'.
  
  100% mortgages are expensive and relatively risky and should be avoided whenever possible. But there are cases where a 100% mortgage (or even the dreadful 125% mortgage) is justified. There are many properties that are run down and in poor repair/decor that need money spent on them and by doing so you can dramatically improve their value. Indeed it has been a traditional step for first time buyers to get onto the housing ladder, buy a cheap property and to do it up while living in it, raise its value and sell it on. In these cases 100% mortgages can be justified and in extreme cases 125% loans as well.
  
  The present market is very difficult and such mortgages are even more risky as a result but this wont last forever, one day the housing market will turn around and prices will rise making for some people 100% loans a workable way forward.
  
  Is it right therefore for Gordon Brown to step in and ban such loans? This shouts of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. It is once again an attempt to dictate too much from the centre with a blanket ban. These things should be left to the market and should be a matter of professional advice based on what suits an individual's need.
  
  If there is a problem here it is perhaps one of the regulation of that advice. The FSA have conducted a review and there are a range of changes coming to how advice is delivered, most of which I personally support.
  
  There are still shortcomings and ways that this can be improved further in respect or mortgages. For instance the seperation of interests between the agent selling the property and the company providing the mortgage advice. To have both provided by the same company seems to me like a conflict of interest as indeed is a 'kickback' between the two where they are seperate.
  
  Brown is dealing with this the wrong way round as has so often been the case over the last 11/12 years.

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