A quarter of people using credit cards to pay food bills

Research carried out by Ipsos for Sky News also found that a fifth have borrowed money to adjust to rising prices this year. Additionally, a quarter of people have sold belongings and 24% skipped meals – while half are socialising less.  

When answering what they have done in response to rises in the cost of living, 60% of people said they had not turned on their heating, 48% are socialising less and 27% worked from home more. The survey also found that more than a third of people have found it difficult to pay their energy bills in the past three months.  

Ipsos’ head of politics research in public affairs Gideon Skinner said: "The levels of concern peaked in August and have slipped back to figures we were seeing earlier in the year.  

“But it’s important to say that the absolute level is still pretty high. We are also seeing that people are now concerned about the whole of the economy more generally, rather than specifically cost of living and inflation.  
“It’s not that people suddenly think everything is going to be fine.”  

Alongside this, it found that younger people – and specifically households with children and those with lower incomes – are all more likely to say they were “very concerned”, and younger people particularly are most likely to have missed payments on bills or set up payment plans.  

Additionally, more than a third of people with mortgages say they’ve already seen their monthly bills rise in the past three months – more than among private renters and local authority tenants.  

The survey also explored what people believed was to blame for rising costs, with almost half thinking the decisions made by Liz Truss and the government have contributed “a great deal” to mortgage rates increasing. This is significantly less than those who think the state of the global economy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit or Covid contributed greatly.