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Repossession and Mortgage Arrears

I shall provide more details later in my speech. Even at the later stage, when cases reach court, repossession is not inevitable, as there is advice and support to help households remain in their homes. People now have universal access to advice desks in courts throughout England, which provide free legal advice and representation to those facing repossession. Last year, more than 34,000 households accessed that free advice. Depending on their circumstances, households may benefit from a range of schemes to reduce their monthly mortgage payments to a level that they can afford. We have put support in place through the benefits system; that includes support for mortgage interest, or SMI, payments being made to customers' mortgage interest payments. In January, we extended the scheme to provide even greater support for home owners. We doubled the capital limit for loans to £200,000; we reduced the waiting period so that households now receive help 13 weeks after claiming benefits; and we froze the standard interest rate used to calculate the amount of SMI awardable to customers at 6.08 per cent until December 2009. Some 220,000 households benefited from SMI last year, and we expect up to 10,000 extra households to benefit from further changes over the next two years. We have put in place a mortgage rescue scheme, under which the local authority can step in, over two years, to support some of the most vulnerable households facing repossession, allowing them to remain in their homes. A housing association will buy an equity stake in the property to reduce mortgage repayments to a manageable level, or buy the property in full and rent it back to the household at a lower than market rent. The scheme has been available from all participating local authorities since 1 January 2009, following the successful fast-tracked delivery of the scheme in nearly 80 authorities last year. I reassure the hon. Member for Twickenham that he can do away with his conspiracy theories. However, he might want a quicker researcher. The figures were published at 9.30 am today. They show that more than 5,000 households struggling with their mortgage received free advice from their local authority in the five months from January. By the end of May, more than 200 households had benefited under the mortgage rescue scheme, which stops the immediate threat of repossession and freezes charges, and a further 295 households are at the assessment stage. We are now focusing intensively on ramping up take-up and accelerating processing times. We are determined to ensure that help through the mortgage rescue scheme is available to all who need it. We are listening closely to feedback from our delivery partners, money advice agencies, local authorities and registered social landlords, and we are responding flexibly. We have already amended the scheme to include second-charge loans and households in negative equity. We will continue to keep the scheme under review.