Money Statistics: March 2020

Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for March 2020

Personal debt in the UK

• People in the UK owed £1,680 billion at the end of January 2020.
• The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £60,363 and per adult was £31,845, around 112% of average earnings.
• Net mortgage lending rose by £3.62 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending rose by £0.557 billion.
• Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 420,602 enquiries in January 2020 with 85,837 of those related to debt.

Spending and Loans

• On average, 72.2 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in February 2020, a fall of 15.5% on February 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 Q3 2019, households in the UK spent £109 million a day on water, electricity and gas, or £3.92 per household per day.
• UK Finance figures show that 52.4% of credit card balances were bearing interest in November 2019.

Mortgages and Rent

• Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1.451 trillion at the end of December 2019.
• Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1.455 trillion at the end of January 2020.
• The average mortgage interest rate was 2.37% at the end of January 2020. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £3,134 in mortgage interest over the year.
• HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £194,464 in January 2020, an annual increase of 1.4% and a monthly fall of 0.2%.
• According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 1.4% in the 12 months to February 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, 1.94 million households did not have access to the Internet in 2019. This included 27% of one adult households aged 65+.
• Low-income people pay a ‘poverty premium’ in buying their goods and services of £256-£490 per year, according to the Social Market Foundation.

The full report can be found here.