My hon. Friend makes a valid point. Members in all parties will have seen the sector’s expansion on their high streets. I do not normally refer to the Daily Mail, but it published an article on the increase in payday loan advertising, which is a concern. I am cautious about the process of normalisation, particularly children and young people seeing these businesses on our high streets and in advertising.
We must remember the extent of the problem of payday lenders charging interest rates of up to 4,000%, for example, on temporary loans taken out by desperate families who often have nowhere else to turn. Someone commented earlier that so-called legal loan sharks did not break the legs of those who borrowed from them like illegal loan sharks perhaps would, but we have to understand that the many desperate families who turn to these services to borrow, sometimes for the basic necessities of life, often end up broken in different ways.
Up to 5 million families plan to borrow money from payday lenders in the next six months; as we have heard, between 2009 and 2012 the market more than doubled to about £2.2 billion; more than one third of those who take out a payday loan do so to pay household bills, such as gas and electricity; 1.5 million households spend more than 30% of their income on unsecured credit
repayments; and personal debt is expected to rise to 175% of household income by 2015—that is the concern about what is happening to families in the real world.