Figures released by The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on Friday showed a rise in court orders for repossessions within England and Wales during Q1 2008.

The number of repossession orders in this period were 9% higher than the final quarter of last year and 17% higher than over the same period in 2007. The MoJ figures do not show the actual number of properties which were physically repossessed, instead they only show the number of actions put forward by mortgage lenders to the courts. A much smaller number of these court orders will lead to actual repossession.

Following the release of the figures, both The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and The Royal Institution of Charted Surveyors (RICS) passed comment.

CML stated that the figures should be kept in perspective. Out of 11.8m mortgages CML expects 45,000 of these to end in repossession this year, approximately 0.38%. Bernard Clarke, communications manager for CML, puts these figures into further context by referring to the repossession data for the mid nineties, where the number of outstanding mortgages was over one million more. This means that the overall percentage of repossessions was higher at approximately 0.47%. When looking beyond 2008 he said “There is not much sense predicting beyond 2008 because there is so much uncertainty in the markets at the moment.”

David Stubbs, senior economist of RICS, echoes the estimation put forward by CML: “ We continue to believe that repossession themselves will increase to around 43,000 in 2008, still well below the low point of 76,000 in 1991.”