Brakes on a new style Swift

I'd be astonished if it needed new anything at 10k miles with the driving you describe.

More likely something is just objecting to moving very little and very rarely, as evidenced by the lube job doing the trick, albeit briefly. A good cleaning out and lube like before will probably do it the world of good. As would a fortnight touring the lake district. Give it some work to do.

Steve

Well, that kind of confirms my thoughts!

It does sometimes get a good old belt (couple of hours each way at the weekend) but it doesn't seem to make much difference. I'd put it down to the disks corroding slightly, and that might still be it - but having phoned the garage to get them to check it (pre-empting my other halfs idea that he was going to take it into Kwik Fit (NOOOOO!!!)) they have said it's a recurring fault with these, so they are going to have a look at it.

Worth knowing you think the same as me tho, just in case they try to pull a fast "well they needed changing" on me!

Spooks

Brakes generally squeal because the pad is moving in the caliper slightly and vibrating pretty sharpish (somewhere on the far side of 10KHz to make the typical brake noise). It's not a sign of any particular problem, generally brake pads have some sort of backing to try and reduce it, and if that isn't working, a bit of copper slip on the back of the pads damps the vibration a bit and sorts it (NOT on the friction surface...).

New brakes is likely to be bit OTT - I used to get through brake pads and disks every 6k on a Ka, along with front tyres, but that was a very hard driven car, and the Kas have very little engine braking to speak of so the brakes do a lot of work, along with small unventilated disks (they'd get to smoking temperatures fairly regularly). Pads and disks need changing when they're down to the minimum thickness which will be specified in the Haynes or dealer Service manual.