Nationwide is temporarily restricting its maximum loan-to-value for self-employed borrowers to 85 per cent.

In an email to brokers, the building society says it is doing so in order to bring its criteria in line with other lenders.

It says: “As with all lending policies, we’ll continue to review our approach and hope to relax criteria in the future”.

Its maximum LTV for employed borrowers remains at 90 per cent.

At the same time Nationwide says it is bringing in a number of criteria “improvements” tomorrow which are designed to reduce the number of high LTV cases that need to be referred to underwriters.

It says the changes mean “your FTB applications could now receive an ‘accept’ decision without needing to be fully underwritten – and receive an initial assessment within our standard timescales”.