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Community Banking

Consultation has concluded

As part of the Borough Manifesto commitments to empower people and grow the borough inclusively, the council has committed to developing a holistic community banking offer that ensures fair, affordable and responsible financial products and services (such as loans, savings and bank accounts) are available to everyone living and working in the borough.

This page sets out some context and background for the project and will be regularly updated with further information as plans for the project are progressed over the next few months.


Why is this project needed?

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).

As part of the Borough Manifesto commitments to empower people and grow the borough inclusively, the council has committed to developing a holistic community banking offer that ensures fair, affordable and responsible financial products and services (such as loans, savings and bank accounts) are available to everyone living and working in the borough.

This page sets out some context and background for the project and will be regularly updated with further information as plans for the project are progressed over the next few months.


Why is this project needed?

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).

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