The Survey of Mortgage Lenders (SML) was launched on 1st April 1992 to succeed the 5% Sample Survey of Building Society Mortgage Completions (BSM) (See GN:33191). The aims were to improve the survey in three principal ways: a) to broaden the range of institutions surveyed to incorporate other mortgage lenders in addition to building societies and Abbey National. With the entry of the high street banks and then the centralised lenders into the mortgage market, information provided by the building societies no longer represented the whole market in the way it did when the BSM was set up in the 1960s. b) to extend its coverage to include further advances, remortgages and top-up loans in addition to first mortgages. c) to increase the level of detail on the questionnaire especially with respect to the characteristics of the mortgage loan. An important consideration for users of the data is that the SML figures allow continuity with the BSM survey results to be maintained for a reasonable period.