UK banks and building societies lost £23.35m a day in loans to individuals during the last 12 months to April 2010.
The lenders lost a total of £9.6bn, statistics published by charity Credit Action show. In the first three months of this year banks and building societies saw £2.13bn in loan write offs, £1.25bn of which was credit card debt.
The statistics also revealed that gross mortgage lending rose to £11.3bn in May 2010, a seven per cent increase on the £10.5bn figure for the previous month. The average UK house price in April 2010 was £150, 500 – a 10.5 per cent increase on April last year, while the average house price for first time buyers was £153, 803 – which is 12.2 per cent higher than April 2009.
Chris Tapp, director of Credit Action, said: “These figures demonstrate quite how dramatically we as a nation have come to rely on credit to allow us live beyond our means.
“I think these statistics demonstrate the need for a fundamental change in our attitudes as a society. In the way we have borrowed we have, as a nation of consumers, effectively taken big risks, gambled our futures.”
Average consumer borrowing on credit cards, motor and retail finance deals, overdrafts and unsecured personal loans had reached £4,513 at the end of the first three months of 2010, while average household debt in the UK stood at £57,995 including mortgages. The average personal debt of a UK adult including mortgages is £30,000, which is 126 per cent of average earnings.
The number of people unemployed for more than 12 months increased by 85,000 over the first quarter of 2010 to reach 772,000, while the number of people of workable age currently inactive reached a record high of 8.19 million by the end of the first three months of this year.
Total UK personal debt remained at £1.46 trillion, which is more than the whole country produces in a year.