Since June 2020, the council has worked with the Financial Inclusion Centre on how we can grow access to more affordable and responsible forms of credit and financial services. The purpose of this appraisal was to set out some data that evidenced why we needed to act and do this - looking in particular at high interest credit use - and use this insight to provide recommendations on what affordable finance provision could look like in the borough.
Barking and Dagenham unfortunately is a borough with low average credit scores and significant use of high interest loans:
Every year 6,000 households take out 20,000 subprime credit loans to the value of £9.4 million. Due to the high interest rates involved, this translates into £16.7 million being repaid each year.
The borough is 8th lowest out of 387 local authorities in terms of the credit scores of local populations, meaning Barking & Dagenham can be classified as a credit desert.
Designing and delivering a new community banking service for the borough is one way in which we can start to address this and make the borough a better place to live, work, study and stay.
We have the ambition to strengthen the borough’s financial confidence, resilience and keep more money in the local economy, while directly challenging and providing an alternative to high cost credit giants (such as BrightHouse).
We need your help!
A student researcher from the University of Derby is currently looking for people aged 18-64, who live in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, to take part in some research about seeking help for money worries. Specifically they are interested in finding out how people’s decisions about seeking help may be affected by their day to day emotions. You don’t need to be experiencing any money worries yourself, they just want to capture the opinion of a wide range of people with different circumstances. Interested? Then please check out the survey here.
It should only take 10 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous – no personal or identifiable data will be collected.
If you would like further information about the project, more details are available on the first page of the survey using the link above – you can access this information without participating in the survey.
Thank you very much for your help and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Matt Earnshaw (m.earnshaw3@unimail.derby.ac.uk) should you have any further questions.
What is Community Banking?
Since June 2020, the council has worked with the Financial Inclusion Centre on how we can grow access to more affordable and responsible forms of credit and financial services. The purpose of this appraisal was to set out some data that evidenced why we needed to act and do this - looking in particular at high interest credit use - and use this insight to provide recommendations on what affordable finance provision could look like in the borough.
Barking and Dagenham unfortunately is a borough with low average credit scores and significant use of high interest loans:
Every year 6,000 households take out 20,000 subprime credit loans to the value of £9.4 million. Due to the high interest rates involved, this translates into £16.7 million being repaid each year.
The borough is 8th lowest out of 387 local authorities in terms of the credit scores of local populations, meaning Barking & Dagenham can be classified as a credit desert.
Designing and delivering a new community banking service for the borough is one way in which we can start to address this and make the borough a better place to live, work, study and stay.
We have the ambition to strengthen the borough’s financial confidence, resilience and keep more money in the local economy, while directly challenging and providing an alternative to high cost credit giants (such as BrightHouse).
We need your help!
A student researcher from the University of Derby is currently looking for people aged 18-64, who live in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, to take part in some research about seeking help for money worries. Specifically they are interested in finding out how people’s decisions about seeking help may be affected by their day to day emotions. You don’t need to be experiencing any money worries yourself, they just want to capture the opinion of a wide range of people with different circumstances. Interested? Then please check out the survey here.
It should only take 10 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous – no personal or identifiable data will be collected.
If you would like further information about the project, more details are available on the first page of the survey using the link above – you can access this information without participating in the survey.
Thank you very much for your help and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Matt Earnshaw (m.earnshaw3@unimail.derby.ac.uk) should you have any further questions.
