Money Statistics: February 2022

Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for February 2022

Personal debt in the UK

• People in the UK owed £1,765.6 billion at the end of December 2021.
• The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £63,528. Per adult this was £33,328, around 108.7% of average earnings. This is up from the revised £33,306 a month earlier.
• Net mortgage lending rose by £3.57 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending increased by £233 million.
• Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 397,709 enquiries in January 2022, 5.8% up from January 2021.

Spending and Loans

• On average, 44 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in January 2022, an increase of 19.9% on January 2021.
• The number of ATMs (in-branch and remote) fell from 54,574 at the end of 2020 to 53,398 at the end of 2021 (a fall of 2.15%.)
• In Q3 2021, households in the UK spent £118.9 million a day on water, electricity and gas.
• UK Finance figures show that 52.8% of credit card balances were bearing interest in November 2021

Mortgages, Rent and Housing

• Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1,567.5 billion at the end of December 2021.
• The average mortgage interest rate was 2.01% at the end of December 2021. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £2,867 in mortgage interest over the year.
• HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £228,627 in December 2021, an annual increase of 9.9% and a monthly change of 0.9%.
• According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 2.0% in the 12 months to January 2022.

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 FCA Financial Lives Survey, in February 2020, 5.4 million people relied on cash to a great or very great extent, with 2.5 million using cash for all their payments.
• According to Ofcom, 1.5 million households did not have access to the Internet in March 2021. This included 18% of one adult households aged 65+.
• Recent research by The Social Market Foundation found that low-income households pay a ‘poverty premium’ in buying their goods and services of £490 per year.

The full report can be found here.