A COUPLE who admitted to being "financially naive" were left in mortgage misery and faced paying £37,000 to cover debts of just £6,000.

Layton and Jillian Cooper, of Sycamore Grove, Darwen, were left owing thousands after taking out a second mortgage to meet their debts.

Now HFC Bank has offered the couple a reduced settlement payment thanks to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

The couple claim they received bad advice from the HFC Bank in Blackburn and were charged unusually high interest rates. Their payments continued to rise.

The negative equity on the couple's terraced house left them unable to sell their home despite being on the market for three years.

The problems began for the couple, who are both psychiatric nurses at Queen's Park Hospital, when they ran into difficulty with a £6,000 personal loan from the HFC Bank.

The interest rates in 1991 were extremely high and Layton, 32, and Jillian, 33, were struggling to meet the £300 a month payments on top of their existing mortgage.

The Coopers visited the HFC Bank to try to sort out their financial misery and were advised to take out a secured home-owner loan of £8,600 to pay off the existing debt. The loan consisted of 300 monthly repayments of £155.54 at an APR of 23.8 per cent.

But Layton said the payments varied and rose over four years.

He said: "We never had a statement for our account to say how much we were paying.

"We paid back at least £7,465.92 over four years but all the time the principal debt was growing.

"After four years when we wanted to settle, we were told we still owed more than £11,000."

The couple have taken out another mortgage, this time at the current rates with the TSB and say payments will have totalled £37,000 by the time the debt is settled in five years.

But after the Evening Telegraph contacted HFC's head office in Berkshire, the bank reduced the final settlement figure by £2,019 to around £9,000.

Mrs Cooper said: "That is absolutely brilliant news, thanks to the Evening Telegraph."

A spokesman for the HFC Bank said: "We are going to offer the customer a lesser figure as a reasonable solution in the interests of customer service."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.