On the face of it, it's easy to criticise the mortgage rescue scheme introduced by Labour in 2009. At first, there were a limited number of takers, with local authorities only helping a fraction of the households that came forward with difficulties.
Now the National Audit Office has weighed in by pointing out that only 2,600 households were helped to avoid repossession, instead of an expected 6,000, while the cost to the Exchequer was £240m compared with the forecast £205m.
The main reason for this is that, where households qualified for assistance, most opted for the more expensive option of selling their home to a housing association and becoming tenants rather than the cheaper option of an equity loan from the government. In other words, at the height of the credit crunch and recession, they opted out of home ownership. Hardly a surprise really.
Yes, the mortgage scheme may have been inefficient and, yes, the last government probably got its sums wrong. But let's look at the whole thing in perspective.
In spite of the terrible consequences of banks offering mortgages to people that could not afford them, the number of repossessions was far lower than forecast by the Council for Mortgage Lenders, and lower than during the housing market collapse of the early 1990s.
In November 2008, the CML predicted that repossessions would reach 75,000 the following year (a similar number to 1991). In the event, 47,900 homes were repossessed in 2009 and a further 36,300 in 2010. This was not only due to the mortgage rescue scheme, but other efforts to dissuade lenders from turfing families out of their homes, for which the last government deserves praise.
Strangely enough, nobody from Labour came forward this week to defend the scheme or the previous government's efforts to reduce repossessions. Are they so keen to wash their hands of Gordon Brown and his legacy that they are unwilling to snatch even a little credit when it's due?
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