Right, to end the month, we’ve got a housing market stat-tastic bonanza, are you ready? Here we go…

- The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) said that courts in England and Wales issued 42% fewer repossession orders in Q4 ‘09 compared Q4 ‘08.

- There were 16,928 orders for home repossession in Q4 and 46% of orders were suspended.

- The Government Mortgage Rescue Scheme has helped 276 households since it launched in January 2009

- Over 15,000 households have received free repossession advice from their local authority since January 2009

- From December to March over 9,000 repossession cases went to court desk advisors, over 7,500 of these had the immediate risk of repossession lifted.

There you go, a Happy Ending.

Last month we reported on the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and their plans to introduce new repossession laws to help protect struggling home owners. The new measures will ensure that home owners who are finding it difficult paying back their loan are treated fairly and equally by lenders.

Well now we’re a month nearer to these laws being in place and they can’t come too soon for those in need of them. As well as these laws being put in place, there will also be new rules governing the Sell and Rent Back market that will ensure home owners who need the cash from their home are also guaranteed a roof over their heads. With these two movements in place, 2010 stands to be a good year for home owners needed to make tricky financial decisions.

Today’s topic – House Repossession – what did you expect? A favourite here on the Repossession.net blog, the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), have released yet morefacts and figures. This time they’re all about repossessions and show that banks and lenders took 10,200 properties into possession in Q4 of 2009. Quarter on Quarter, this figure was 13% lower than Q3 but when the whole of 2009 is assessed, repossessions totalled 46,000 properties, a level not seen since the mid nineties.

The only positive is that ‘09 figures didn’t meet the grim forecasts at the start of year, forecasts that this year put repossession numbers at some 53,000 with around 205,000 arrears cases to boot.

The newly regulated sell and rent back industry may well see even more popularity based on the findings of research by FindaProperty. Their hard work uncovered the fact that February saw the number properties available to rent fall to the lowest point in over a year, the knock-on effect of which is a 1.2% rise in rent prices, bumping the national average up to £814 per month.

The problem is, rising house prices, limited credit and less rental properties means there are a glut of people stuck with very few options for accomodation and shelter. The only winners are Landlords who will see an increase in rents and tenants staying longer because of few alternative options.

On Wednesday, we blogged about the new housing strategy that the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has put forward. It plans to scrap affordable housing targets for the Capital and as a side-effect, make it much harder for people to qualify for the Homebuy programme run by the Government.

This is because Boris will be raising the household income limit to £74,000 from £60,000 but as a sweetner, or a distraction depending how you look at it, he’s said that around 50,000 affordable homes would be built by 2012. Despite the indifferent welcome for the new strategy, the Mayor did say that near £40m has been spent by London boroughs bringing 1,700 empty or repossessed houses back into use.

Boris Johnson, London’s Mayor, has announced a new housing strategy for the capitol which involves the abolishon of affordable housing targets and a drop in new low cost housing for City residents. The affordable housing programme was initiated by former Mayor Ken Livingston and aimed to make 50% of new homes in the Capital affordable.

But under Johnson’s new plans, only 13,200 homes would be built each year in London that qualify for social renting, a number some 2,755 fewer than the affordable housing target. And for many, the major worry is: with house reposession numbers high, where will evictees find new affordable accomodation?

If you were here last Monday, you’d have read about the Bank of England’s (BoE) lending figures for January 2010, some interesting stats in there and there are a few more worth looking at…

As well as a low in home loans, UK banks has to write off an unparalleled £4.12billion in bad credit card debt throughout 2009. On top of this, the amount of money written off when home owners were unable to repay the mortgage and couldn’t stop repossession doubled over the year from £408million to £984million.

Overall, the total amount of credit wiped out by the banks came in at just over £9billion – recovery is a while away yet.