A NUMBER of mortgage lenders are being slow to pass on last week's interest rate cut to their customers, it emerged yesterday.

Only four of the UK's biggest lenders announced they would be reducing their rates in line with the drop in the Bank of England base rate on the day the Monetary Policy Committee announced it was reducing rates to 4.5 per cent.

Britain's biggest mortgage lender, Halifax, as well as HSBC, Northern Rock, and Cheltenham & Gloucester, part of the Lloyds TSB group, all announced they were reducing their rates by the full 0.25 per cent on Thursday last week.

They were followed on Monday by Abbey, which also said that it would be cutting its standard variable rate by a quarter of a percentage point.

But other lenders, including Nationwide, Barclays, the Woolwich, the Royal Bank of Scotland group, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley, all still had their mortgage rates under review last night.

Banks and building societies have also been slow to announce what will happen to their savings rates following last week's cut.

Abbey has reduced the majority of its savings rates by 0.25 per cent, but all the other major lenders said they had not yet made a decision on whether to cut their savings rates in line with base rates.