Exactly what a Nineteen Sixties cartoon cat tells us regarding the post-crisis mortgage market

Wall to wall protection. Mortgage promoting has a brand new pitchman. Angélica Portales/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Entrepreneurs are purported to be creative folks – and seeking to interpret their considering can typically invite a descent in to the futility of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Halifax's determination to construct its newest mortgage-lending marketing campaign round High Cat deserves consideration, as it’d simply inform us something in regards to the altering terrain from the UK home-buying panorama.

Let's first remind ourselves who High Cat is. He's the streetwise chief of a gang of Ny moggies. He lives in a back-alley dustbin and spends a lot of his time courting the wrath of the native constabulary. He's a loveable rogue, after all, however he's a hustler along with a huckster. His day-to-day routine often consists of working to make a quick buck, avoiding arrest, arriving residence on the again of a milkfloat simply sooner than midnight, draining a bottle of stolen milk, lobbing the empty bottle over the fence, donning his pyjamas on and on to rest.

It's robust to think about somebody would need this type of person like a neighbour, as well as be ready to present him a two-year mounted cashback deal at an preliminary charge of 1.94%. Perhaps there will be a follow-up advert during which he strikes in after Officer Dibble.

A brand new icon for aspirational home-buyers?

It's additionally price making an allowance for High Cat's origins, given that a well-liked college of thought would be that the character was based mostly on Phil Silvers' Sergeant Bilko, arguably one of the most decided conman in tv background. Do not forget that Maurice Gosfield not solely performed Bilko's principal stooge, Non-public Duane Doberman, and also voiced High Cat's chief foil, Benny the Ball.

So is our mortgage-seeking position mannequin a police-dodging near-itinerant impressed by a barrack-room chancer having a persistent playing habit? Is this fact actually the message the Halifax's advertising machine needed to convey? The state line is that High Cat's involvement exhibits Halifax “because the uniquely human face of banking”. Noble sufficient, however unabashed marketing-speak.

Publish-crisis catnip

Frankly, it's unlikely that would-be customers are inspired to establish rich in Cat just because he shares their cash-strapped plight. As an alternative it could simply be that that is extra a question of period.

In any case, High Cat is really a product of the Nineteen Sixties. So the current nonetheless often surfaces around the Cartoon Community, and was even re-screened through the BBC only a few years previously, however the truth is that it most readily strikes a chord with these people for whom childhood is really a distant reminiscence. If Halifax really wants to attraction to first-time consumers of the 20s and 30s – the millennial era – then why aren't Ren and Stimpy, He-Man and Skeletor or Beavis and Butthead on our screens, looking for enticing fixed-rate offers?

Fort Greyskull: Imposing three-bed property in sought-after Eternia.

Current initiatives within the mortgage market provide some clues. Earlier this year, for example, in response as to the it described as “the evolving wants of our clients”, Halifax raised wear and tear restrict for debtors to 80, thus which makes it potential for a 55-year-old to take out a 25-year mortgage.

Nationwide duly responded by upping its personal restrict to 85. Henry Jordan, the corporate's head of mortgages, spoke of consumers who “are sometimes asset-rich, with important fairness of the residence, and want to have the flexibleness to borrow towards it”.

So are debtors getting older? Sure with no. Tellingly, Nationwide conceded its new facility might serve “a spread of mortgage-borrowing wants”.

Who’re you, kitten?

Might this function as the place our feline close friend actually suits in to the larger image? High Cat's starring position won’t signify that lenders have abandoned millennials by itself, nonetheless it might nicely trace at a nascent acceptance of how their mom and dad or grandparents are serving to fund their home-buying goals. Does Hanna-Barbera's most fascinating really signify some type of subliminal rallying cry for the so-called “Financial institution of Mum and Dad”?

'What would you imply you do not have sufficient for any deposit?'
Monkey Enterprise Pictures/Shutterstock

Detailed Council of Mortgage Lending (CML) figures are dispiritingly difficult to get – trickier, say, than securing a mortgage just in case you are a cat that lives in a bin. If you wish to begin to see the nitty-gritty – the proportion of mortgages backed by guarantors, for instance – it’s essential to be considered a fee-paying member.

But similarly info since the CML makes freely obtainable clearly present the travails of first-time consumers within the years since the monetary disaster. Together, varied surveys, together with one not long ago printed by funding dealer plan, have underlined the length of the home-ownership challenges coping with millennials, lots of whom concern they may by no means be capable to set foot around the housing ladder with out the aid of their households.

Typically talking, the underside lines are that lots of millennials have a very good little bit of debt and a lot of millennials' mom and dad (or grandparents) have a good little bit of money. That is the considering behind Barclays' Household Springboard mortgage, which permits a purchaser to purchase a house with no borrower deposit if his or her family members – and exactly how deeply liked they should be – are in a position to provide 10% from the property's worth as a safety.

High Cat, you scamp, have you ever fooled us once again in any case these years? Are you actually simply making use of the generosity of era X? Beneath that trademark waistcoat and straw boater, are you only a pitchman for benevolent baby-boomers? Or have we only grow to be too cynical within our outdated, offspring-bankrolling age? It's arduous to state for positive; nevertheless it's one thing price getting animated about.

Robert Webb doesn’t work with, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that may make money from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.