This week Id like to go public with a game I have been forced to play with my mortgage company for the best part of a year. In our house it has become known as "mortgage chicken".

In January 2008, conscious that we were one of the 1.4 million UK households due to come off a low fixed-rate mortgage deal, (in August 2008) , I started looking around for a new deal, before we were forced on to our lenders SVR, which is 2% higher than Bank of England base rate.

By April it looked like I’d mis-calculated, as despite the a base rate cut of 0.25%, all the talk was of interest rates needing to rise to stamp out inflation. But still I could not shake the feeling that all was not rosy in the housing market, nor the wider economy, and that rates would have to fall not rise, despite what the papers reported.

Come mid-July and we got notification that our monthly repayment when we switched over to the SVR was going up by just short of £400 a month. A lot. And to say my husband was not happy with my managing of our mortgage renewal would be an understatement.

But still, the best fixed rate deals were considerable higher than our existing rate and what’s more came with arrangement fees of £1,500-£2,000. These in my opinion were not just extortionate, but extortion.

To be even more blunt – banks who let’s not forget for the most part were the architects of their own downfall – have been looking around for ways to boost earnings and decided once again to put the squeeze on consumers.

It is nothing short of a tax on the vulnerable.

How else can mortgage provides explain the rate at which such "fees" have shot up in recent years. If it really costs a bank 10 times more, to process a mortgage in 2008 than it did in 2004, then I think it is only fair to conclude that the industry is in a much bigger mess than it has currently owned up to.

So, faced with such extortion and by now receiving weekly emails from economists warning that the UK was not just facing recession, but depression, I reasoned that we should sit tight for a bit, take the hit of a larger monthly repayment in the short term for the possibility of smaller mortgage costs in the – hopefully – not to distant future.

Fast forward a few months and our mortgage payments are back to where they were in July, and should the Bank of England cut rates again on Thursday then we will actually see our mortgage repayments fall further. This is because our provider is one of the big banks currently either majority-owned by us taxpayers, or about to be so.

In terms of our game of chicken, we have been aided immensely by the intervention of the Government. Indeed it has been pleasing – to put it mildly – to see the Government get tough with mortgage providers over interest rates in recent weeks. After all, why should the banks be allowed to rebuild their balance sheets at the expense of consumers? While it has yet to act over arrangement fees, and can do little to force banks to offer lower new deals, its firm action over rates linked to base rates, is already helping ease the pressure on millions of mortgage holders, me included.

As a postscript to this, I should add that if rates are cut on Thursday we will be sticking with our December repayment figure, and using any excess over and above what our rate falls to, to make overpayments. Thus ensuring we do not miss an opportunity to shrink total mortgage debt, better equipped in case the game turns against us.