Earlier this year we commissioned Ipsos UK to conduct an online omnibus survey of 4,132 GB adults aged 18-75 to help us understand consumers borrowing habits, including their product use.

In this video, our Credit and Consumer Markets Lead Niall Alexander, and our Social Research Associate Alejandro Gasteazoro explore findings on the use of unregulated credit and discuss what this means for the financial lives of people across the country.

This research asked around 40 questions to participants, covering their personal financial circumstances, income, debt and savings levels, and details on what products they have personally used in the past 12 months including:

• borrowing from friends and family, and whether the amount they borrowed was more than or less than £250
• use of unlicensed lenders or loan sharks,
• BNPL use, and the frequency,
• their coping strategies including whether they went without food or heating, used food banks, or if they could meet an unexpected but necessary bill of £500.

We found that 4% of those sampled said they had personally used an unlicensed lender or loan shark, over 20% had borrowed from friends or family, with a worrying number repaying more than they borrowed and 25% of sample had used BNPL in past 12 months, with significant connections between those incurring penalties and other unregulated credit use.

We look forward to sharing more releases covering our findings and impacts from other areas including presence of children in the household, income insufficiency, and minority ethnic group in future weeks.

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch with Niall@fair4allfinance.org.uk and keep your eyes peeled for updated analysis (reflecting on period to end of Q1 2025) from Infinian coming soon.

You can view the full slide deck here

Our wider work on the shape and size of the credit market tells us that there are causes for concern, where people who are seeking small sums of money and being declined are likelier to pay a high consequence for credit refusal.

We know it will take everyone working together to tackle these concerns and increase financial inclusion, that is why we are working to find solutions that allow a range of lenders, including community finance, banks and other responsible lenders, to widen access to affordable credit, particularly small sums of credit to households. There is a need for it and when done properly these small sums of credit can make significant impact in people’s lives.

If you wanted to find out more specifically about what this means for illegal moneylenders such as loan sharks, you can read more on the rising tide of illegal moneylending on our website – which was recently highlighted in the BBC and on BBC Morning Live.

The Ipsos omnibus online survey was weighted to the known representative proportions for age and working status within gender, and for social grade, Government Office Region, education (graduate/non-graduate), ethnicity (white/minority ethnic) and household size, a total of 4,132 GB Adults aged 18-75 were sampled.

Additional notes on video 

1. For clarity, whilst the survey is weighted across the 4,132 respondents to the known representative proportions for ethnicity (white/minority ethnic), there is no weighting within ethnic groups. We make reference to distinctions between some minority specific ethnic groups and white people in the video, caution is advised on this aspect as the profiles achieved naturally could be responsible for some of the differences. 
2. We also state in the video that we made every effort to try to only include sample sizes that exceed 100 people, in the slides two samples shown had less than 100 people. 
   1. One where we reference “the most common regulated product for those that use 3 or fewer were overdrafts and credit cards”. The base for this group is 44 (users of unlicensed lenders or loan sharks who use 0-3 regulated financial products). 
   1. The other is “users of unlicensed lenders or loan sharks are much more likely to have incurred late fees on their BNPL products. 82% of these borrowers have felt the impact of a penalty fee”. This is based on users of unlicensed lenders / loan sharks who also use BNPL, so an unweighted base of 74.