Brits borrow £360m 'every day'
Published On 14 March 2007
Consumers in the UK are currently borrowing £360 million every single day, according to new research.Credit Action, the national money education charity, indicates that secured borrowing accounts for £324 million of this total, with unsecured borrowing amounting to £36 million.
Incredibly, spreading this debt evenly across every man, woman and child in the UK would see each individual increasing their arrears by £5.94 during the course of the day.
In the next 24 hours, 300 people in the UK will be declared insolvent and 5,300 will seek advice about their spiralling debt problems, the new report has found.
Despite this, there is little evidence to suggest that Britons are curbing their spending habits, with 24.3 million plastic transactions taking place every day. Brits also make 7.4 million withdrawals from cash machines, taking out a staggering total of £471.3 million.
Chris Tapp, the associate director of Credit Action, said: "Day by day in the UK we now borrow and spend at an astonishing rate, it is such a key part of our everyday life. However, there are real risks associated with this pattern as the numbers of people falling into difficulty on a daily basis shows.
"We need to make sure that we are thinking very carefully to ensure that the money we are borrowing for today, we can afford to pay pack tomorrow."
With 60 million inhabitants, the UK is home to just 12 per cent of Europe's 728 million citizens. Despite this, recent studies suggest that the UK is responsible for a third of all European consumer debt.
