Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what information his Department holds on the number of properties repossessed in (a) Worcester, (b) Worcestershire and (c) England in each of the last 10 years.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders collects data on the number of properties that have been repossessed, and provide this to the Ministry of Justice who publish the data and it can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/mortgage-and-landlord-possession-statistics

The data are for the United Kingdom as a whole. No further geographical breakdown is available. Data for 2005-14 is shown in the attached Table 1.

The Ministry of Justice collects and publishes mortgage and landlord possession statistics, which include mortgage and landlord possession claim actions in county courts in England and Wales. Data is available at county and local authority level and can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/375809/mortgage-and-landlord-statistical-data-june-to-september-2014.zip

Data for Worcester, Worcestershire and England, 2005-14, is shown in the attached Table 2.

According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the number of mortgage possessions is at its lowest annual figure since 2007.

Moreover, Bank of England statistics published on 9 December 2014 state that the number of new mortgage arrears cases is at its lowest quarterly level since the statistical series began in 2007.

The action that this Government has taken to tackle the deficit left by the last Administration has kept interest rates down and helped reduce the number of repossessions.