One house was repossessed every ten minutes in the third quarter of last year as the rate of seizures almost doubled, the Financial Services Authority said yesterday. The City regulator said that 13,616 homes were repossessed in the three months to September last year, a 92 per cent rise on the third quarter of 2007.

There was also a rise in the number of homeowners in arrears, indicating that hundreds of thousands of borrowers could lose their homes.

The FSA said that 340,000 borrowers were behind on mortgage repayments, a 10 per cent rise compared with the previous quarter of last year and a 24 per cent rise on the same period in 2007.

Adam Sampson, of Shelter, the housing charity, said: “These figures show just how difficult and miserable 2009 will be for British homeowners. We are engulfed by a housing crisis worse than the 1990s crash.”

The figures released yesterday are worse than previous estimates from the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML). It has estimated that 225,000 homeowners were at least three months in arrears by the end of 2008, and predicts the figure will rise to 500,000 at the end of this year.

Figures from the CML are compiled using data on first charge and buy-to-let mortgages from both regulated and unregulated lenders. The FSA uses data from 300 regulated mortgage lenders, but includes second-charge loans secured against a property.

The CML estimates that 45,000 homes were repossessed in 2008 and predicts that this will rise to 75,000 in 2009.

Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents, said: “These figures appear to show that the six-month delay on repossession orders that many of the banks announced at the end of last year was not taken soon enough. Most importantly, it demonstrates the vicious cycle of recession in which unemployment leads to missed mortgage payments and repossessions, which in turn discourages banks from lending and, ultimately, stops potential buyers getting on to the property ladder in the first place.”

The Department for Communities and Local Government released figures yesterday showing a jump in the number of families on council housing waiting lists, from 1.67 million in April 2007, to 1.8 million last year.

Despite a rise in demand, the Government admitted that the number of council homes had fallen to 1.8 million in April last year from about 3.18 million at the same time in 1999.

The Government has committed an extra £200 million to expand a range of schemes aimed at tackling the sharp rise in repossessions.

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