…That’s not something I’m likely to say very often.

But Chancellor Alistair Darling deserves praise for his attack on the banks’ over-eager attitude to lending.

Between us, we Brits owe more than £1.3 trillion and record numbers are struggling to keep up with mortgage and other debt repayments.

In today’s Daily Telegraph, Mr Darling says the big banks need to get back to ‘good old-fashioned banking’.

And that means being far more cautious about who they lend to.

He makes it clear borrowers share some responsibility for their troubles, saying: “They need to ask themselves, ‘Can I repay this?’”

He adds: “Institutions have in some cases been prepared to lend to people without checking if they were ever going to repay it.

“It doesn’t do any good for anybody, particularly the person in debt but also the lender, to be getting into a situation where you have bad debts.”

Well said – if banks didn’t lend irresponsibly people wouldn’t be able to get into such a mess.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under UK Personal Finance, Debt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.