The Office of Fair trading (OFT) has said that it will accept the promises of 3 West Yorkshire debt management companies that they will improve their standards.

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The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is warning people with debt problems to be vigilant when approaching companies to help them with debts, as it says it has identified 27 websites run by 13 companies which it believes are deliberately misleading customers for commercial gain.

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New research has predicted that 5 million households will be in negative equity by the end of the year, with already heavily indebted first time buyers likely to be the worst hit.

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It sounds too good to be true, but many people carrying credit card debts could arrange to have them wiped out - completely legally, and with no extra debt or credit rating damage. Intrigued? Read more here…

A committee of MPs have said that mortgage lenders who pursue repossession too quickly should face sanctions for breaking the guidelines of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), who insist that seizing a home should be the last resort in cases of mortgage arrears.

The rise in the number of repossessions last year to 40,000 implies, say the MPs on the Commons communities and local government committee, that lenders aren’t taking this guideline to heart and are rushing into repossession proceedings before other options have been fully explored.

New figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) report that 40,000 properties were repossessed in 2008, the highest figure since the dark days of the early 1990s, when 75k homes were lost in 1991. The figure represents a 55% jump on 2007 figures, but the bad news doesn’t end here - many forecasts say that 2009 will see the repossession total almost double.

By the end of 2008, around 182,000 mortgages were in significant arrears - behind by 2.5% of the loan amount or more - representing a 50% rise over the course of the year.

CML Press Release

The Office of Fair Trading has ordered 16 ’sell and rent back’ companies to substantiate the claims they make in advertisements. If there is any discovery of ‘unfair and misleading’ claims, then the firms could be open to prosecution.

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The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) have released new figures showing a dramatic rise in the rate of home repossession, with 48% more properties taken into repossession in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2007. In total, 18,900 homes were seized.

The number of mortgage payers in arrears was also up sharply, rising 29% to 155,600.

While the CML acknowledged that the figures were likely to continue to get worse, a spokesperson stressed that the number of homeowners facing real problems was still small when compared to the 11.75 million open mortgages in the UK, and that the hardest hit mortgage payers were those with sub-prime deals which have become more expensive and harder to obtain because of the credit crunch.