75,000 set to lose their homes

The group expects a 67% surge in the number of people who lose their home during the year, up from an estimated 45,000 for this year. It also expects around 500,000 people to fall at least three months behind with their mortgage repayments, compared with 210,000 in 2008.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) warned that despite the work the Government and industry were doing, 2009 was going to be a "very tough year" for the UK mortgage market.

It expects net lending to turn negative for the first year since records began in 1964, meaning that consumers will repay more on their mortgages than they borrow.

Net lending, which strips out repayments and remortgaging, is expected to dive to minus £25 billion, as new lending fails to keep up with repayments. The figure is well down on net lending of £40 billion for 2008 and £108 billion in 2007, a level that the Government has urged the industry to replicate next year.

Total advances are also expected to be considerably lower at £145 billion in 2009, down from around £258 billion this year and less than half the £363 billion advanced in 2007.

The group said a significant number of the properties that were repossessed were likely to be cases where the home had been abandoned by its owners or the property had been used in a fraud. A sizeable proportion of the cases are also expected to be buy-to-let properties. But it added that even though lenders had committed to working with homeowners to help them avoid losing their homes, the worsening economic backdrop pointed to an "inevitable increase" in the number of cases where a sustainable alternative solution could not be found.

Meanwhile, officials figures showed retail sales rose by a shock 0.3% last month in the first positive growth for Britain's battered high street since August.

The unexpected rise between October and November came as online shopping boomed and food and household sales soared amid a retailer price war.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) sales volumes data continued to confound experts as it once more defied gloomier polls from the sector. Experts had been forecasting a seasonally-adjusted fall of at least 0.4% from retailers in a month that saw well-known names MFI and Woolworths collapse into administration.