Yorkshire and Chelsea building societies are planning a merger that has just been approved by both sets of members.

If the formalities go ahead, the resulting building society will be the UK's second largest after Nationwide, with combined assets around £35bn.

Yorkshire BS currently occupies the #2 spot on its own, with 2 million members, while Chelsea is #4 on the list largest with approximately 700,000 members.

Why are the two societies merging?

According to a Chelsea spokesperson, simply as part of a "strategic review" — to plan for the future, that sort of thing. Although according to Mike Davies, head of mortgages at Skerritt Consultants, "both companies have not been able to lend as much as they want to and will need to merge to continue functioning."

The new society will also include Yorkshire's dormant specialist lender, Accord Mortgages.

As with most mergers, we're not expecting anything particularly exciting to happen as the deal is trodden out, but it's predicted the process will be complete by April 2010. If they do decide to change the name to Yorksea or Chelshire, we'll let you know.

A look at the good and bad guys when it's time to revert to your lender's standard rate.

Following yesterday's post on Standard Variable Rate (SVR) increases, we thought we'd round up the current highest and lowest revert-to rates we're aware of.

The range between the best and worst in the market is quite staggering — but then, these are (still) exceptional times. 

Best & Lowest Mortgage SVRs:

The following data is correct at time of publishing:

As you can see, some lenders followed the Bank Of England's movements and are still at 2% (a 'normal' kind of margin) above the base rate.  Their customers will be pleased to just sit tight at reversion time!

Worst & Highest Mortgage SVRs:

Meanwhile though, other lenders have acted as if nothing has happened in 12 months:

For an argument on why building societies are putting up SVRs, see yesterday's post. However, if you have one of these lenders' mortgages, you're not going to see the funny side of a standard variable rate nearly twelve times base rate.  Re-mortgage options might be a bit limited at the moment, but there's no harm in getting some advice!