Georgina Green

The take-up of mortgage payment holidays in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic was extraordinary: according to UK Finance, holidays granted reached a peak of 1.9 million during the pandemic, or roughly one in six mortgages. But which households benefited from the scheme? In this post I use rich UK household survey data to conduct an in-depth analysis of the distribution of the debt-relief scheme at an individual level. I find that borrowers struggling to keep up with payments during Covid applied for a holiday, suggesting the scheme played an important role in preventing a sharp rise in defaults. There is also evidence that some households may have taken them as insurance against future shocks, possibly dampening precautionary spending cuts.

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