Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for February 2021
Personal debt in the UK
People in the UK owed £1,696.4 billion at the end of December 2020.
The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £60,860 and per adult was £32,014, around 107.5% of average earnings.
Net mortgage lending rose by £5.45 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending fell by £1.38 billion.
Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 376,038 enquiries in January 2021, 16.0% down from January 2020.
Spending and Loans
On average, 36.8 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in January 2021, a fall of 46.8% on January 2020.
The number of ATMs (in-branch and remote) fell from 60,662 at the end of 2019 to 54,574 at the end of 2020 (a fall of 10.0%)
In Q3 2020, households in the UK spent £119.7 million a day on water, electricity and gas, or £4.29 per household per day.
UK Finance figures show that 54.4% of credit card balances were bearing interest in October 2020.
Mortgages and Rent
Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1,494 billion at the end of December 2020.
The average mortgage interest rate was 2.12% at the end of December 2020. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £2,882 in mortgage interest over the year.
HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £210,727 in December 2020, an annual increase of 7.9% and a monthly increase of 1.3%.
According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 1.3% in the 12 months to January 2021.
Financial Inclusion
According to the FCA, in the UK in 2020 there were 1.2 million people who did not have a bank account. This was 2.3% 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.
