Across England And Wales Almost 28 000 Property Owners Were Forced To Hand Back The Keys To Their Homes After Failing Behind On Their Mortgage Repayments Between 2015 And 2022

Across England and Wales, almost 28,000 property owners were forced to hand back the keys to their homes after failing behind on their mortgage repayments between 2015 and 2022. 
With interest rates predicted to hit 5.5 percent and warnings that the 's policy, could 'push the United Kingdom into recession', more than two million householders face the prospect of seeing their mortgage repayments jump by £500-£600 a month over the summer.  
In County Durham, some 723 homes were repossessed during that period according to figures released by the Ministry of Justice. 
In the year before , 172 properties were repossessed, falling to 31 and 16 in 2020 and 2021.

Last year this figure jumped to 73.
England's biggest local authority, Birmingham, has seen 678 repossessions. 
Though, of the top ten repossession locations in England and Wales, five of them are in Yorkshire. 
Now there are fears that as a result of the cost of living crisis and , . 
For the two million people coming to an end of fixed rate mortgages which had been locked in at 1.5 per cent, they are now facing a new deal at 5.5 per cent - meaning an immediate £500-£600 a month increase in servicing their debt. 


!function()"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a)if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"])var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r On Friday, a teacher from Hertfordshire told Today on BBC Radio 4 that he and his wife have had to make major changes ahead of their current fixed mortgage rate deal expiring over the summer. 
This has included taking a second job. 
'Our current mortgage is around £1,400 a month.

It expires in August. The quotes we are getting are around £2,000 a month and when we looked a couple of months ago, the mortgage estimates were around £1,800-ish. 
'They are now, for a two-year, around £2,000. If we were to fix for five years it would be around £1,900, but we are fixing it at a lot higher interest rate for a longer period of time.'
Mohamed A.

El-Erian, economist and President of Queen's College, Cambridge warned the economic outlook is uncertain with the prospect of stagflation a possibility. He said last week's IMF briefing that the UK was set to avoid a recession was made before the worrying inflation data was made public.
He told Today: ‘There were three inconvenient truths in the inflation report.

One: While headline inflation is coming down, it is not coming down as fast as anticipated. Second: Core inflation, which is the underlying inflation pressures, went up. And third: We still have inflation rates which are well above the US and Germany and France.
‘I think that if the IMF had anticipated this report, which most people did not, I don't think they would have been so optimistic.'
Prof El-Erian said the Bank of England had no option but to continue increasing interest rates, from 4.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent.
He said interest rate hikes alone will not be enough to reduce the current inflation rate as the UK has productivity and supply chain problems along with issues with the labour market.
He said: ‘The Bank of England will increase interest rates, but unless the government steps up its efforts to increase productivity and improve supply chains and labour market functioning, we will end up in a situation where the Bank of England actually pushes us into recession.'
Almost 28,000 properties have been repossessed by financial institutions since 2015 according to figures released by the Ministry of Justice
Within the total, 28,180 mortgages were in the most severe arrears band of 10 per cent or more of the outstanding balance.

This was a 1 per cent decrease compared with the previous quarter.
The economic outlook is very mixed with despite the . 
Some retailers have tried to hide the extent of price rises by making the size of their products smaller.

Tesco, for example, has reduced the size of . They have also hiked the price by 15p - which works out as a 37.8 per cent real terms increase. 
The practice, known as , MortgagXpert.net sees retailers reduce the size of an item as a sleight of hand way of introducing a sizeable price hike. 
The issue of home repossessions is growing increasingly problematic, according to UK Finance. 
During the first three months of 2023, 750 houses had been repossessed, an increase of 50 per cent on the last quarter of 2022. 
Buy-to-let mortgages repossessions have also shown a sharp increase during 2023 as landlords also struggle under escalating interests rates.  
<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS news" data-version="2" id="mol-1651cbd0-fb9d-11ed-a626-35c13a015009" website heart-breaking map of home repossessions in England and Wales