People in debt ''unlikely to face prison''

People in debt in the UK are more likely to see their possessions seized or their services stopped than be sent to prison, an industry expert has said.

Commenting after figures showed that the total amount of personal debt rose to $1.44 trillion by the end of June, the director of charity Credit Action, Chris Tapp, explained that the way in which lenders perused debtors depended on the way the money had been borrowed.

He said that those people with debt in the form of mortgages or secured loans who were unable to pay the money back were likely to find themselves forced "to sell the property" or that the lender might "repossess the property".

"In terms of people with unsecured debt, lenders might use county court judgements and bailiffs to try to recoup their debts," Mr Tapp added.

"It tends to be more about the removal of a service, or the seizure of goods or the repossession of a house, so that the lender can get back as much as possible, than imprisonment."

In May, the Insolvency Service published figures that showed that were 25,264 individual insolvencies in England and Wales in the first quarter of 2008, up 1.7 per cent on the previous quarter.

Nearly 10,000 of these were in the form of IVAs.