Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for December 2020
Personal debt in the UK
People in the UK owed £1,688.5 billion at the end of October 2020.
The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £60,580 and per adult was £31,867, around 109.1% of average earnings.
Net mortgage lending rose by £4.77 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending fell by £1.03 billion.
Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 373,773 enquiries in October 2020, 15.8% down from October 2019.
Spending and Loans
On average, 45.6 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in November 2020, a fall of 43.2% on November 2019.
The number of ATMs (in-branch and remote) fell from 63,160 at the end of 2018 to 60,662 at the end of 2019 (a fall of 4.0%)
In Q2 2020, households in the UK spent £116 million a day on water, electricity and gas, or £4.16 per household per day.
UK Finance figures show that 53.9% of credit card balances were bearing interest in September 2020.
Mortgages and Rent
Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1.483 trillion at the end of October 2020.
The average mortgage interest rate was 2.12%at the end of October 2020. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £2,869 in mortgage interest over the year.
HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £205,662 in October 2020, an annual increase of 4.9% and a monthly increase of 0.7%.
According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 1.4% in the 12 months to November 2020.
Financial Inclusion
According to the FCA, in the UK in 2017 there were 1.3 million people who did not have a bank account. This was 3% of the UK adult population.
According to the 2019 Access to Cash Review, 2.2 million people use only cash in their daily transactions.
According to ONS, 1.11 million households did not have access to the Internet in Jan-Feb 2020. This included 20% of one adult households aged 65+.
Recent research by Turn2us and Fair By Design found that low-income households pay a ‘poverty premium’ in buying their goods and services of £478 per year.
