Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for October 2024
Personal debt in the UK
People in the UK owed £1,864.9 billion at the end of August 2024.
The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £65,665 and per adult was £34,536, around 95.6% of average earnings.
Net mortgage lending increased by £3.056 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending increased by £305 million.
Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 237,154 enquiries in September 2024, 3.4% up from September 2023.
Mortgages, Rent and Housing
Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1,633 billion at the end of August 2024.
The average mortgage interest rate was 3.73% at the end of August 2024. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £5,668 in mortgage interest over the year.
HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £246,576 in August 2024, an annual increase of 3.4% and a monthly change of 2.0%.
According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 8.4% in the 12 months to September 2024.
Spending and Loans
On average, 45.18 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in August 2024, a decrease of 5.5%on August 2023.
The number of ATMs (in-branch and remote) fell from 50,300 at the end of 2022 to 47,711at the end of 2023 (a fall of 5.2%).
In Q2 2024, households in the UK spent £147.58 million a day on water, electricity and gas, or £5.20 per household per day.
UK Finance figures show that 49.4% of credit card balances were bearing interest in July 2024.
Financial Inclusion
According to the FCA, in the UK in 2022 there were 1.1 million adults who did not have a bank account. This was 2.1% of the UK adult population.
According to ONS, in 2022 there were 8,060bank and building society branches in the UK. This was a reduction of 750 branches (-8.5%) from the year before.
According to UK Finance, in 2023, 1.5 million adults mainly used cash, the first yearly rise in cash usage since 2019.
Fair By Design has estimated that the cost of the poverty premium to a typical parliamentary constituency is £4.5 million a year. This equates to over £430per year for a low-income household.