Debt
Today’s news on payday lending is welcome, but enforcement matters as much as legislation
The campaign to tackle the payday lending sector has been gifted another small victory today as the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills publishes a report calling for more focussed regulatory attention to the sector.
The unbanked are increasingly excluded from mainstream society
In the UK 12 per cent of people do not have access to a bank account.
The Thatcherite legacy is a paradoxical Conservative Party
There has been a conflict in Conservative Party economic policy for the last thirty years - between conservative values of frugality and the rise of personal debt.
The government needs to take the growth of payday lenders more seriously
Payday lending has historically been referred to as fringe banking in the United States, but you couldn't deny it's anything other than big business today.
Public sector borrowing higher this year than last
The latest public sector finances data, released today by the Office for National Statistics, show that public sector borrowing in 2012/13 was £118.8 billion when you exclude Quantitative Easing and Royal Mail pensions. Higher than in 2011/12, when it was £118.5 billion.
Asking borrowers to pay more is not the answer for credit unions
In the wake of changes announced by chancellor George Osborne last week on the amount at which a credit union can charge in interest for one of its loan products, Joseph Wright of Civitas has written a paper entitled Credit Unions: A Solution to Poor Bank Lending? exploring the industry and its rates.