UK's financial woes worsen during another turbulent year

Rent and mortgages hiked

Facing rising prices, people do at least have the option of cutting back on how much food they eat or how warm they keep their homes, but they have little ability to cut back on housing, and both rents and mortgages have become a big burden for many people recently, especially those who have renewed their mortgage or signed a new tenancy agreement.

Arthur Chen, a graduate student in London, is one of many tenants who have faced a steep increase in rent during the past two years, despite official statistics from the ONS showing that private rental prices in the UK have only risen by 5 percent this year.

"There is a sharp contrast during and after the pandemic," said Chen, who is co-renting a two-bedroom flat near Battersea Park in London. "In 2020, the rent was 1,500 pounds a month, and now it is 2,000 pounds. And this flat has been among the cheapest ones in the area."

Chen found a job in the City of London last year and has managed to go on living in his flat, but many of his classmates who progressed to doctoral studies have had to move out of central London.

"Some of them moved to Ealing, some moved to Wanstead, some to Sutton. They then spent two hours commuting," Chen said.

In order to tame the high-flying inflation rate, the Bank of England, the UK's central bank, has hiked its benchmark interest rate from 0.1 percent at the end of 2021 to 5.25 percent, which has pushed up the mortgage rate and affected those who bought homes.

The bank said in its financial stability report published on Dec 6 that UK households and businesses will continue to face higher borrowing costs, and that close to 500,000 households were predicted to spend more than 70 percent of their post-tax income on their mortgage by the end of next year.

The interest rate will have to remain high for longer to bring inflation back down to the bank's 2 percent target, it said. Market forecasts expect the interest rate to stay at its current level until at least July, before starting to fall to 4.75 percent by the end of 2024.

According to the Resolution Foundation think tank, around 5.1 million households in the UK had already faced an increase in their mortgage rate by the fourth quarter of 2023, and for the 1.7 million households whose fixed-rate mortgage deals end this year, the average annual mortgage bill will rise by 3,000 pounds.

Morgan Wild, head of policy at Citizens Advice, a UK charity that provides one-on-one free advice to help people get over their problems, said they saw more people in 2022 than in the previous 10 years combined, and that they got steadily busier during 2023 because of people with debt problems.

"You see massive cutbacks in people's spending on groceries, massive cutbacks in transport. The one thing you don't see cutbacks on is housing, because you can eat less, you can heat your home less, but you can't consume half a house," said Wild.

"We are now helping a record number of people facing homelessness… their rents are going through the roof and they aren't necessarily getting enough points to move up the housing register and get access to social housing because our supply of social housing is incredibly squeezed."