Authors: Andrea Finney (Social Research and Statistics)
Funded by: Money and Pensions Service (MaPS)
Published by: University of Bristol
Publication date: September 2020

Credit Counts is one of five headline measures making up the Money and Pension Service’s (MaPS) UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing for 2020 to 2030. It is about people’s ability to manage credit day-to-day and MaPS’s chosen measure is based on people not using credit for everyday essentials.

Those who very or fairly often use credit for food and bills are defined as using credit for everyday essentials and are counted in the ‘credit for essentials’ group described here. There were an estimated nine million adults in the UK who met this definition in 2018 and the Money and Pensions Service has set a national goal for reducing this by two million people.

This report explores the characteristics of the ‘credit for essentials’ group as a whole (in Section 2) before considering three identifiable subgroups within the group.

---

Analysis of the 'credit counts' national strategy measure (PDF, 552kB)