We haven't had one of these since late March, then there was a bit of a hiccup (something to do with a change of government) but the new lot now appear to have found their feet* and are going full steam ahead in the same direction:
Home owners given new protection by FSA
New rules to protect struggling mortgage holders have been outlined by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). The rules seek to help people who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments, with the FSA saying they must be treated fairly by lenders. The FSA also wants to ensure all mortgage advisers have been approved as "fit and proper" persons...
Under the new rules for treatment of borrowers in arrears, the FSA is insisting that:
- firms must not apply a monthly charge where a repayment agreement for arrears is already in place
- any payments made by customers must be first allocated to clearing the missed monthly payments, rather than to arrears charges which can be repaid later
- repossessions should always be the last resort.
In addition, firms will be obliged to record all telephone calls with customers in arrears and keep them for three years...
The headline is particularly sickening. The people they want to 'protect' are not really home owners in any real economic sense, they are renting money from the bank. And what's good for the 'struggling mortgage holder' is bad for the bank, and what's bad for the bank is bad for the taxpayer (seeing as the self-same banks owe the taxpayer around £300 billion, or a quarter of outstanding UK mortgages). But "it will be good for house prices", and that's the only thing that matters nowadays.
* We can't really count the Council Tax reductions as they promised they would do that in their election manifesto.
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13 comments:
Yet there'd be outrage if the same was done for renters...
AC1, we have the same for renters - it's called 'Housing Benefit', which is of course yet another subsidy for landowners.
At this time of year we should all be making the most of the sunshine anyway and living in tents.
I don't know what the obesession with houses is, if I was rich I'd spend all winter in hotels abroad and all summer in a tent fishing.
S_L, indeed. That's another one of my favourite thought experiments - we all just live in large mobile homes, and move to wherever we fancy and pay the ground rent accordingly.
If you're rich, you buy a mobile home for each family member and rent a large plot in a nice area; if you're poor you make do with a small plot in a not so nice area.
Each local council sets the ground rents such as to maximise its income, but is of course subject to market forces - people can up sticks and move very easily (or split a large plot into smaller plots) so nobody would ever 'lose their home' as a result of the ground rents.
We can argue afterwards over how to spend or dish out that money again.
Why can't they just leave those stupid people who have taken out a mortgage that was too big for them to rot in the streets (or at least go and live with family). I know nobody under 35 who has been able to buy a house without family assistance. Most people would struggle even to save for a 10% deposit. It needs to stop.
Yes! Yes MW, let's all become travellers, but forget ground rents, we'll just park our camper vans where we damn well please and piss off the homeownerists!
EKTWP, you ask 'why'? This is just yet another example of our government's Home-Owner-Ist policies in action.
The best way to stop it is just to reverse all economic policies of the last fifty years (liberalise planning laws - for commercial and residential; reduces taxes on incomes and increase taxes on land values; stop bailing out banks and reckless borrowers etc.)
S_L, there is a big difference between 'squatting/trespassing' and paying a fair price for the benefits that the existence of 'a state' indisputably offers. Plus I've a family, I don't want to live in a camper van, but two or three static caravans joined together would do us just fine.
But pissing off H-O's is always good.
L, be careful what you say about the FSA.
They (or their Tory-sponsored successor quango) will be the ones deciding whether you are a 'fit and proper person'.
M.W. Yeah. Don't I know it. Welcome to the police state. It seems that the public are gradually to realise just how bad the FSA really is. I actually heard a BBC (yes, really the BBC) reporter wonder how they could possibly justify the £3.5Bn of 'taxpayers' (yes, really, again) money they had had in income since 2001, considering how many banks had failed etc. Of course the FSA bod and the Which? wanker reckoned the answer was more fees and more bods. But what do you expect?
Yes, this is another pretty sickening example of govmint intervention to ensure that people who can't afford to buy a house can still 'own' one...
...at our expense :(
When will the madness stop?
Sod it, I don't know why we just don't hang one or two in the FSA 'pour encourager les autres' in our quango state.
L, do you have a link for that?
Anon: "govmint intervention to ensure that people who can't afford to buy a house can still 'own' one..." What's worse, this intervention is designed to ensure that people who could afford to buy one are stuck being tenants (for every repo sale there is a purchaser).
WFW, the Lib-Cons will shuffle them sideways into one of their other new quangoes. I don't think hanging was seriously considered as a solution.
MW/WfW I heard a whisper (so it's probably not true then) that pre-election The Tories shut up FSA MD Hector Sants (who somebody told me is very New Labour, and was apparently briefing against the Tories) - by saying that if they won and then as promised shut down the FSA, they'd move him sideways to a Bank of England deputy governors job, oh and which by the way comes with a knighthood. Of course this is all tittle tattle but it seemed to me that Sants/FSA went a bit quiet pre election day. Ho Hum.
Sorry, no link to BBC piece. I can't remember whether it was Today or PM, and I was driving at the time.
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