Minister: Banks to blame for bad debt

Speaking in an interview, trade and industry minister Jim Fitzpatrick said that easy lending had “stoked the flames” of bad debt.

“If we’ve got a rise in indebtedness, if we’ve got a rise in people having difficulty in servicing that debt… then maybe the banks are lending too much money, or maybe they’re not being as careful as they used to be in scrutinising the applications,” Mr Fitzpatrick told the Financial Times.

“It’s all very well for them to be anxious about repayments and pushing the bar as high as possible to get as much out of people who run into difficulties, but if they’d not lent it in the first place then they wouldn’t be in the difficulty of trying to recover it.”

Earlier this year, most of the major banks reported dramatic rises in cases of bad debt as Britons struggle to make repayments.

For those having problems making repayments, advice on becoming debt free is available for financial concerns of all sizes.