The Fox Report: Payback time
As Britons struggle to kick their debt habit, Patrick Chalmers visited two towns at opposite ends of the UK to see if they are winning
If Naomi is the face of Britain’s new wariness towards debt since the financial crisis, no one’s told her friends yet. They just think she’s strange. Yet the Slough support worker’s caution about money has become less outlandish in the last couple of years, with total UK private debt now settling lower, having more than doubled in a decade.
‘They do think I’m weird,’ said the thirty-two-year-old outside one of the city’s main shopping centres.
‘I’ve never really borrowed any money – if I don’t have money I don’t buy something. It’s just my ethics about life.’
So, Naomi drives an old car and denies her two kids a trampoline in the garden while her friends go off on foreign holidays paid for by credit cards.
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