Beckett won't put figure on mortgage rescue plan

LONDON (Reuters) - Housing Minister Margaret Beckett said on Thursday it is too soon to say how many people will benefit from new measures to help them pay their mortgage if they suffer a sudden and temporary loss of income.

Asked about reports that 9,000 households would receive emergency help, Beckett declined to give a figure and said the numbers involved would only emerge after further talks with the banks.

"It's really genuinely quite hard to judge. It's very much on a case-to-case basis," she told BBC radio. "That's something that may emerge in greater detail as we go into the detail of just how the scheme will work with the different lenders."

Under plans announced on Wednesday, the government will allow some households to defer a proportion of their interest payments for up to two years.

The new Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme will be open to people who experience a "significant and temporary loss of income as a result of the economic downturn," the government said in a statement.

It will be available to those with loans worth up to 400,000 pounds. Those who have lost all their wages can still seek help from the Department for Work and Pensions which has an aid package that from January will cover those with home loans worth up to 200,000 pounds, Beckett added.

"We have been concerned all the way through that there was a group of people for whom none of this would help because they hadn't actually lost all employment but they had lost income through no fault of their own," she said.

"Perhaps one person in the household has lost their job, but not both; perhaps they've lost hours, lost their overtime, they are struggling to make their payments.

"There was nothing in what we could already do to help them. We wanted to see if there was something more that we could do."