It is imperative for the financial services industry to take a long hard look at how it can do more to keep people in their homes and prevent them from enduring the misery of having their property repossessed. Whilst the issues are less emotive from a lender’s perspective, the financial implications are a constant cause for concern and will become more so when interest rates increase from their current artificially low level. The report is a great starting point and some of the numbers and examples illustrate that the current strategy if you can call it that, is not really working. But I think the part that sums it up for me and underlines the main issue comes at the end of the report where it describes the present arrangements as ‘piecemeal and insufficient. The mortgage industry in conjunction with insurers and the government needs to move towards a position where we have a far wider safety net in place and one with much finer mesh. We currently have a situation where repossession cases in the UK are being kept in check largely due to a combination of low-interest rates and increased lender forbearance. However, with increased unemployment and higher interest rates a distinct possibility over the coming 12 -18 months, doing nothing to create a safety net for borrowers isn’t really an option. The latest CML predictions are that 175,000 mortgages will be in arrears by the end of 2010; that’s quite worrying against the current backdrop of very low-interest rates and extended support from lenders. If rates increase by 2 percent over the next couple of years, arrears and repossessions will once again become headline news, hence why we need to act now. It’s a case of paying to sort the problem now or paying out much more to deal with the consequences later.