THE average amount of a British adult's debt has soared by nearly half since the beginning of the decade.

Each Brit now owes an average of £4,000 in loans, overdrafts, credit cards, store cards and finance deals, compared to £2,767 in 2000.

Poor debt monitors, such as data-sharing between lenders and records of mortgage arrears, have allowed consumers to continue to borrow with little control.

Datamonitor, the market analysts behind the research, said five interest rate hikes since November 2003 have done little to dampen consumer demand.

Oksana Selezneva, financial services analyst at Datamonitor and author of the report, said: 'One of the major reasons behind this strong performance is the fact that the majority of bad debt indicators, such as unemployment, records of mortgage arrears and repossessions and county court judgements remain at their historically low levels.

'This has given consumers the confidence to keep on borrowing and the ability to cope with their debt repayments relatively well.'

The figure for the amount of money owed by the average man or woman is made up of £1,302 on credit cards, £1,892 in unsecured personal loan balances and £812 on overdrafts and motor and retail finance deals.

Fears remain about Britain's high level of credit card debt. This form of borrowing accounted for ££119.2bn of the total new consumer credit business transacted last year.

However, the company suggested borrowers may become more cautious in the future as fears persist over the future of the housing market. It expects the growth of the consumer credit market to slow to 4.7% a year by 2009.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in