The stigmatised homeowner: Variegated debt moralities, credit-score governance, and the making of UK mortgage prisoners.

This article examines how UK political and financial elites construct and legitimise the marginalisation of ‘mortgage prisoners’ – homeowners trapped in closed-book mortgages and unable to remortgage. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis of 55 texts (2007–2025), it identifies three discursive practices that emerged sequentially and underpin policy (in)action. Initially, elites downplayed distinctions between active and inactive lenders, legitimising privatisation and obscuring structural drivers of harm. Subsequently, FCA-led segmentation by payment status and credit scores gave rise to variegated debt moralities that differentiated ‘deserving’ borrowers from those subject to default stigma. Finally, invocations of ‘moral hazard’ framed intervention as unfair, reinforcing fiscal restraint and market primacy. Bringing housing class theory into dialogue with financialised subjectivities and credit score governance, the article shows how stigma and moral classification operate within the homeowners-with-mortgages class, reshaping hierarchies of responsibility and deservingness and deepening intra-cohort housing inequality.