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U.K. subprime mortgage lender Money Partners is considering cutting staff and says the slump in the securitization market is a prime reason.

Tuesday evening found Leak at the Norwegian ambassador’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens for Kommunalbanken’s Christmas party. Squeezed into Bjarne Lindstrøm’s front room — no flat panel TVs here, Oslo’s top man in London had a fully fledged string quartet next to the sofa — Leak couldn’t help but be impressed at the turnout. We never suspected that so many syndicate managers, originators and MTN traders were needed for one global dollar benchmark and a few power reverse duals each year, though maybe the bankers assembled just as an excuse to head off to The Collection in South Kensington afterwards.

Kensington Mortgages has been forced to temporarily shelve its subprime product offering as mortgage-backed securities investors have continued to shun non-prime paper.

Debtoffice@Belgium.com How long does it take to get from London to Brussels, for heaven’s sake? Two hours by plane? Not if you’re Guy Reid it doesn’t. He must have cycled here as it took him eight hours, but Eddy Merckx he is not.

The UK subprime mortgage industry suffered its first casualty on Tuesday when Victoria Mortgage Funding, a small non-conforming lender, went into administration.

U.K. specialist mortgage lender Kensington is temporarily pulling out of the secured loan market because of pressures stemming from the U.S. subprime crisis.

ABN AMRO has priced the first deal in its Uropa Securities series, a £615 million ($1.26 billion) securitization of 4,800 U.K. non-conforming residential mortgages.

ABN Amro priced its debut securitisation of UK non-conforming mortgages this week, amid turmoil from Moody’s and S&P’s warnings on US subprime ABS and CDOs.

Tighter restrictions on subprime mortgage lending being proposed in the U.S. are unlikely to appear in the U.K., reports MortgageSolutions.com. “There are a number of differences between our market and that of the U.S., especially with regard to products on offer and the regulations in place,” said Alex Hammond, public relations manager of Kensington Mortgages. “We have a stricter framework for lenders to operate in.”

The sale of Kensington Mortgages to Investec for £283m marks the end game in the story of an amazing business.

Despite the continuing chaos in the US subprime mortgage market, some degree of order seemed to return to the UK non-conforming RMBS sector this week.

Over the last several years, a number of lenders have entered the specialized lender segment, focusing on subprime mortgages in the U.K.