Money Statistics: March 2021

Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for March 2021

Personal debt in the UK

• People in the UK owed £1,700.2 billion at the end of January 2021.
• The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £60,999 and per adult was £32,087, around 107.6% of average earnings.
• Net mortgage lending rose by £5.17 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending fell by £2.79 billion.
• Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 380,283 enquiries in February 2021, 9.5% down from February 2020.

Spending and Loans

• On average, 40.3 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in February 2021, a fall of 44.2% on February 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 November 2020.

Mortgages, Rent and Housing

• Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1,501 billion at the end of January 2021.
• The average mortgage interest rate was 2.09% at the end of January 2021. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £2,854 in mortgage interest over the year.
• HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £208,336 in January 2021, an annual increase of 6.8% and a monthly change of -0.6%.
• According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 1.4% in the 12 months to February 2021.

Financial Inclusion

• According to the FCA, in the UK in 2020 there were 1.2 million adults 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 millionhouseholds 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 £478per year.

The full report can be found here.