Re-mortgage now or wait?

Yes, but if you increase your (their!!) risk by a trivial amount, still well with the LTV cut off, why do they care?

I've got 60k against a 150k property. I've got to jump through hoops to get a 10k advance. But it should be relatively trivial to move to a different lender with a 70k mortgage (I think??)

I went through all this in the past year.

I applied to increase my mortgage from around 25% to 40% LTV (all well within affordability criteria), as the money was to support a deal on another property, they said NO (been with the bank for around 35 years).

Applied again 6 months later, same amount, but this time to do a full refurb of our house. Once more lots of questions, hoops to jump, including a surveyor valuation (even though the LTV would remain under 40%), also had to provide itemised costing of work to be undertaken, showing contingency etc.
Got approved, however I've sat on the offer for months, holding off on the refurb, offer expires next month.

........apart from for the very large number of people whose property wealth originates from those days and that "lax" lending era.....

Still surprises me when I see people complaining about a lending decision citing "I've been with them for 35 years".....

Clients are the most unloyal they've ever been. Lenders are no different. It's probably at least 30 years plus since the length of time you'd been with a bank actually had any positive impact on a lending decision.

You can either satisfy the lending criteria or you can't. Whether you've been with them 35 years or 5 minutes. When clients are able to get a cheaper rate elsewhere, hardly any will stay because they've been with the lender for an extended period of time.....

The above two examples shows that one lender accepted an application for further borrowing, another didn't.

Neither decision was accepted or declined because of;

- The LTV
- The number of years you've been with the lender

Nationwide for example, won't lend additional funds to buy a BTL. Doesn't matter if your LTV is 5% or you have been with them for 35 years, it's just a straight no. Other lenders will do it, no problem......

The 'new kitchen' manovre.

Where it goes wrong is the same place credit card debt goes wrong, in that the average punter forgets to get round to paying it off on the terms that they originally agreed with themselves.

£25k@5% costs over £30k across 25 years but £6k over 5.

£25k @8% over 5 costs £10k

You obviously need to take into account whether the debt being backed by the home puts you into a worse LTV or risk of a worse LTV and consider any fee elements etc but the basic maths is that mortgage debt is cheaper and the largest risk is a failure of personal discipline.

A few have increased them too.....

Not read the link but by the above, do you mean if rates go up more from where they are now or if rates just stay as high as they are currently?

We're still ultimately going to track the FED. U.K. inflation should fall because the energy price cap has been lowered and mortgage rates fell 1% over the previous period. Petrol has risen while oil hasn't because the U.K. refineries are allowed to sell t world prices. It would be nice if we forced them to sell at local prices now it looks like world prices are always going to be higher. Likewise, with renewables, it would be nice if the practice of allowing that to be sold at the highest spot price was ended sooner rather than later.

I would go for a tracker as the fixed rates don’t yet price in much of a fall.

Depends if you mean Bank of England base rates (I agree that it's very unlikely) or Mortgage Rates? which have been going up for the last 3-6 weeks (some lenders are still going up right now but others have made tiny reductions)