Many of Standard’s 1.4 million endowment customers are facing shortfalls between their policy values and the mortgage the policy was designed to pay off. Standard is receiving hundreds of complaints from mortgage endowment customers a week, but because markets have rebounded from their lows in March, many of the shortfalls are now reduced.The company was also able to lower the penalty it charges customers that want to exit their policy early as a result of the reduction in payout levels and a strengthening of the market.. The number of people going bankrupt has hit its highest level since the last recession, triggering fears Britain is on the brink of a debt crisis that could plunge millions of households into financial ruin. This is highest level since the winter of 1993 when the UK was emerging from a slump that had left millions of households trapped in negative equity as house prices crashed and interest rates rocketed. “If this rise is anything to go by, then we could be heading back to the dark days of the early Nineties,” said Alan Bradstock, a partner at accountants Langley and Partners.

It comes just days after mortgage industry leaders warned the Government against “complacency” as official figures showed consumers were taking on debt at the fastest pace since records began.Households borrowed almost £10bn in June, the largest monthly increase since 1993 as mortgage and unsecured borrowing hit all-time highs. Opposition parties, government regulators, lenders and independent analysts are increasingly concerned that debt is escalating at an unsustainable pace. “The growing debt crisis is already beginning to bite,” said Vince Cable MP, the Liberal Democrats’ trade and industry spokesman. “With personal bankruptcies soaring, people may regret borrowing so much if the economy turns even slightly.”Michael Howard, the shadow Chancellor, added: “With the explosion of personal and government debt, and the likely pressure on interest rates, alarm bells should be ringing at the Treasury.”Earlier this week, the Council of Mortgage Lenders said households might not be prepared for a rate rise and warned of the “risk of complacency”.The DTI said a number of factors affected the number of insolvencies, including the availability of credit and unemployment. A spokesman said: “While there is evidence to indicate an increasing trend in the number of individual insolvencies, it is not at the level seen in the early 1990s.”There is growing concern banks are lending to riskier clients in the chase for business. Earlier this year the Financial Services Authority said it was worried that less well-off households were saddling themselves with debt. Malcolm Shierson, a partner at accountants Grant Thornton, said: “The increasing availability of credit at incredibly cheap rates is working to plunge more people into the spiral of debt with their financial imprudence fuelling these figures.”As well as the personal misery for those in debt, analysts are worried about the risk of a sudden crash in consumer spending and house prices if borrowers find themselves unable to repay their loans.

John Butler, UK economist at HSBC, said it showed how vulnerable the economy was. “The fundamentals do not get better than this for the consumer, yet still insolvencies are already rising,” he said. “Bad news lies ahead for the consumer, either in the form of rising unemployment or interest rates.”Patrick Boyden, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, said: “The sharp increase in individual insolvencies should ring alarm bells about the downside of the expansion in consumer credit.”. The old joke used to be why is there only one Monopolies Commission? The new one is why do we bother with two rail regulators? Richard Bowker at the Strategic Rail Authority and Tom Winsor at the Office of the Rail Regulator struggle to see the funny side of it, however, and have been arguing over who should be the Fat Controller ever since their respective organisations were invented. One such moment of clarity occurred recently when Mr Bowker’s director of communications, Ceri Evans, was unwise enough to liken Mr Winsor to a supermarket price-checker. He went on to venture that if Mr Winsor thought he was responsible for the size, quality and cost of Britain’s rail network, then this was “an aberration which should never had made it into print”.Mr Winsor, who is a lawyer by training, immediately threw the rulebook at Mr Bowker, resulting in a grovelling apology this week in the letters columns of this newspaper. The letter sounded as if, indeed probably was, dictated by the Rail Regulator himself But this latest spat begs a serious question.

As the organisation which funds the industry, the SRA should also be the one which decides what sort of a railway it gets for its money. Logically, therefore, the SRA ought to subsume the responsibilities of the Office of the Rail Regulator.The turf war between the two regulators provides entertainment for the press but it doesn’t do any favours for the rail network. Take the latest dispute over the modernisation of the west coast main line. Mr Bowker has made its completion at the earliest date a priority. Mr Winsor has suggested delaying the scheme for a year to save money.When Stephen Byers abolished Railtrack, he also intended to abolish the Office of the Rail Regulator. The only thing which stopped him was the need to have some form of independent body to whom the train operators could appeal if there were disputes over access charges and the like with Network Rail. Now that the SRA is responsible for Network Rail, it clearly could not act as this appeal body.