PROTECTION AGAINST REPOSSESSION

That this House urges Her Majesty's Government to provide funding to local authorities on the scale necessary to buy up, at market rates, the large and growing number of houses which will be repossessed by building societies and other lenders in this year's credit squeeze and to make the former owners council tenants paying rent, thus adding, at low cost, to Britain's council housing stock, avoiding turning people out onto the street where the council would in any case become responsible for re-housing those with families while at the same time preventing the housing market being swamped and clogged by large numbers of difficult to sell houses being dumped on it.