Increasing numbers of people are going to struggle to pay their bills this year, a leading debt charity has warned.
More and more Britons are to have trouble paying their household bills over the next few months due to the credit crunch, the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) has predicted.
The charity said that it was already finding an increasing amount of people seeking their help due to an inability to meet their daily costs; moreover, this trend is backed up by recent figures from Capital Economics.
According to the group's study, the share of average incomes in the UK spent on so-called 'unavoidable costs' such as food and bills has gone from 25 to 31 per cent over the past six years. Included in this total is mortgage payments, which currently take up around ten per cent of income.
Moreover the most recent results of the government's preferred benchmark for inflation has tracked a 0.5 per cent rise, from 2.5 to three per cent, in the past month alone.
A CAB spokesperson said: "More people are seeking our help because they are having problems paying their day-to-day household bills.
"The combination of big increases in household bills, especially fuel, and rising housing costs is putting additional pressure on people’s finances when in many cases they are already stretched to the limit."
