The charity said that across the UK’s 11.2m households with mortgage debt, outstanding secured lending reached £1.256trn at the end of the month. This figure was up year-on-year from the £1.242trn figure posted last August.

The average amount owed by each UK adult was £28,754, a figure which includes mortgages and is marginally down on July’s number of £28,770.

Credit Action found this debt was around 117% of average earnings. Excluding mortgages, the average household debt stood at £5,949.

The study also reported that a property was repossessed every 15 minutes 30 seconds during the last quarter. Banks and building societies wrote-off £1.15bn in loans to individuals during the past year, that figure included £567m of credit card debt.

This equalled a daily write-off of £12.52m.