It enacted a couple of schemes to assist people who had fallen into difficulty with their mortgage.
The first was some ridiculously-difficult-to-qualify-for scheme for people who had experienced severe, sudden loss of earnings.
We’ve never been able to place anyone on this scheme and it has been allowed to die off quietly, alone and unlamented like a fart at a dinner party.
The bigger and, it has to be said, more successful scheme is Mortgage Rescue, where the government gave a big pot of money to local authorities to assist people in long-term difficulty with their arrears.
On a patronisingly basic level, if your house fitted a price bracket and you were able to afford to pay a ‘rent’, it would buy the house and rent it back to you.
Brilliant idea.
We’ve passed on at least a couple hundred accounts onto this scheme and avoided repossessing them.
Wales has something similar and Scotland has something different and Scottish, but equally benevolent. Certain councils run their own schemes, with bridging loans in return for charging orders against the house, or part purchases and other convoluted ways of getting people out of a hole.
The trouble is that a lot of the councils have finite budgets and can only do so much. Especially in the ‘New Age of Austerity’ and ‘The Cuts’ we’re going through, which is a shame.
Hopefully, the scheme won’t be allowed to die off.
The big tidy up the FSA has done on mortgage lenders over the last five years rooted out a lot of the bad, customer unfriendly practices, which were embedded in the industry, and government interest doesn’t feel as intense as it was, say, in 2008.
I’m hoping it doesn’t lose interest and assumes everything is hunky dory, but keeps the scheme. It’s a nice, tidy solution for all concerned.
