Gill Hankey who runs the Bankruptcy Advisory Service and was awarded an MBE after 14 years of work on behalf of bankrupts and others in financial difficulty says.

The lenders are going hell for leather to get repossessions through. The government’s told them they have to go softer with a new set of court protocols from November 17. It means that right now they’re rushing everything through as soon as they can.

Yesterday I saw a woman from Tyneside with a Northern Rock mortgage. She’d taken one of those 125% deals, and is now nearly £90,000 in negative equity. The property is valued at only £120,000. The fixed rate has ended and she can’t afford the new payments, so they are about to start repossession proceedings.

All lenders are moving much more rapidly to repossess now that house prices are falling so fast. They think that if they hold on, they’re going to be left with a property that’s dropped even further in price.

But it’s the credit card companies which are worst; they shout loudest. They start hounding you after you’ve missed one or two payments. They ring morning, noon and night, and all weekend.

I have one client who is 84. He only gave up work last year, as a post boy for a firm of lawyers in London. He has no assets and just the state pension. He had three cards with debts of £6,000 but can’t afford the minimum any longer. They’ve started ringing him five or six times a day.

People think you’ve got to pay off the card first. So they miss their mortgage instead. But whereas the lenders used to let arrears go four or five months before starting proceedings, now they start after someone has missed just two payments.

It’s changed a lot in recent months, the repossession cases. They are often professional people. I know a lot of legal practices teetering on going under; they rely upon conveyancing, but nobody’s doing any. A solicitor I work with laid off 15 lawyers last week. The firm across the road is laying off 19. It’s the same for surveyors, too.

A lot of middle class people, even a few months ago, would never have thought they could be facing bankruptcy. They thought they had a regular income and a secure future. And to be honest, they were using credit to fund a lifestyle beyond what they really could afford.

“But what I feel most strongly about is the way the banks are now behaving. When they run into problems, they go to the government and get bailed out within 24 hours. But when you run into problems, it’s a completely different story.” Source: The Guardian.

Yes, we bailed them out, however they sure-as-hell aren’t going to help us out