The Observer ran an article at the weekend about the mis-selling of mortgages. Turns out, in the words of the Citizen's Advice Bureau (CAB), that, pre-2008, "we were seeing lots of evidence of irresponsible lending people being lent mortgages they could never properly afford and unsuitable lending with people being given products that weren't necessarily right for them and a lot of the problems were driven by intermediaries".
That means regardless of whether you think moral responsibility for this kind of thing rests with the lender or the borrower that "it was only a matter of time before the claims management industry started moving in".
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