There were the lowest mortgage arrears last year for more then a decade, the Council of Mortgage Lenders has reported.

Fewer than one in 1,000 mortgages ended in repossession in 2015, and fewer than one in 100 mortgages were in arrears.

The CML quarterly data shows home-owner mortgage arrears running at 1.03% of all loans at the end of 2015, with buy-to-let arrears at a lower rate of 0.31%.

However, lenders are more likely to repossess buy-to-let properties than owner-occupier homes, with around one repossession per 2,500 mortgages in the buy-to-let market in the fourth quarter of the year compared with one in 5,000 in the home-owner market.

At 10,200, the total number of repossessions in 2015 was less than half the number in 2014 – down from 20,900.

However, the CML said that caution is needed on the year-on-year comparison, because the timing of some possessions may have been affected by a court case which has been causing lenders to review their processes.

That case was Bank of Scotland v Rea, which related to the way fees were charged interest calculated on some loans in arrears.

In the aftermath of the case, some lenders paused repossession proceedings while they considered the implications.

The postponed cases are like to re-activate this year.

* Separately, the Ministry of Justice has also published the latest mortgage and landlord possession statistics for England and Wales, for the last quarter of last year.

Between October and December there were 36,601 landlord possession claims in the county courts. Most (62%) were claims by social landlords. The statistics also show that there were 9,775 repossessions by county court bailiffs.

The Department for Communities and Local Government has published updated guidance about obtaining possession of a rented property here