The details of the financial Services Bill were made public recently and it sets out a raft of changes for the financial sector. Changes include new ‘class action’ powers and increased regulation of the banks, but some think there should have been more to help people avoid house repossession proceedings.

Labour MP, Rob Marris has said he’s going to campaign for changes to the proposed Bill after it failed to incorporate protection for tenants who live in houses that are being repossessed from the landlord. Currently, tennants can be given just a few days notice that they are going to lose their home. Marris is planning to meet with ministers from the Treasury and Local Government and has made it clear that if Government don’t do anything, he would table an amendment.

Have a guess which town in the UK has experienced the highest number repossessions in the last 12 months… ok guessing time over. The town in question is Doncaster and it’s been named as a repossession blackspot where 855 home-owners have been unable to avoid repossession since September last year.

This fact comes to us courtesy of the Government as part of their scheme to highlight where homes are considered at greatest risk. The figures, released by The Misinsty of Justice, are based on the number of repossession orders in the system and the unemployment stats for the area. Of the 855 possession claims, a staggering 660 led to repossession orders being issued.

A family legal team that help families to stop repossession proceedings and avoid eviction has received a whopping £100,000 investment from an un-named party. The money is a result of promising early work at a time when UK repossessions are up 80% on last year to over a quarter of a million.

The company, Revival Action, is one of many leagal outfits that endeavour to stop repossession orders through the negotiation of more achievable repayment plans. The investor has taken a 20% stake in return for the money and indicated there’ll be more available to help more home-owners with legal aid over the next five years. Read more about the story here.

According to figures released by the Council of Mortgage lenders (CML), the Government have helped 300,000 homeowners avoid repossession to date. This is great news but as Housing Minister John Healey MP told a recent CML conference, some lenders are still repossessing properties before considering alternative options.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) refuses to name these lenders which has angered many industry journalists and campaigners. However, the financial watchdog will bare its teeth if necessary as we read in a repossession.net blog post last week. We can only hope that the FSA find enough dirt on these home-snatching vagabonds to be able to issue a hefty and ever so slightly crippling  fine.

The latest figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) are expected to reveal a grim possibility – that UK is heading for its highest number of repossessions for nearly 20 years. In total; 24,200 home-owners lost their property as a result of missed mortgage payments in the first 6 months of the year. Not since 1996 have so many people failed to stop repossession and lost their home.

On the plus side, repossessions did slow in the second quarter of 2009 and it looks very unlikely that the CML’s prediction of 1992-esqe numbers (65,000) will be reached. This slight upturn is down, in part, to super-low interest rates and support from the Govt. plus a little more lenience from lenders.

Earlier in the week, we posted about GMAC-RFC the mortgage lender being fined £2.8m for the inappropriate handling of repossessions which led to unnecessary reposessions.  Yesterday, Which? personal finance campaigner Dominic Lindley spoke out about the length of time it took the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to issue the fine.

According to Lindley, the FSA knew about GMAC’s irresponsible behaviour as far back as mid-2008 yet took no action for over a year. As if that wasn’t bad enough for the FSA, they offered the lender a reduced fine, down from £4m, for early payment. You can read more about the story at MoneyMarketing.co.uk.

Did you catch any of the BBC Radio 4 show: Repossessions in the Sun? It was a sad tale of expats that headed abroad to find their dream home only to lose it through missed payments or (more often than not) ill thought-out purchase decisions.

One lady had owned a home in the Canary Islands but came back to England still owing a hefty mortgage on it, like many home-owners in the UK at the moment: she doesn’t like opening her post. These repossession cases are quite often down to poor advice or no advice rather than falling behind on payments and as a legal representative said: “They see the sun, they get some sangria in them, and a lot of them don’t use lawyers.”