On the face of it, Alex Newport was a clear success story.

In his late 20s, he was working as an IT manager at Barclays with his own home and a £40,000 salary. However, in 2012, events took an unexpected turn when his partner lost his job.

“My partner became unemployed, which put a strain on both of us, as it was just me bringing money into the household. He had benefits and took what he could get from the job centre, but this was just at the end of the credit crunch and it was hard to get work,” Newport says.

He paid for his own mortgage and helped with his partner’s rent, as well as buying food and other essentials, putting some of it on credit cards.

“It was £100 here, £200 there every couple of months. I was only making the minimum payments, which went up by a fiver or a tenner a month, so you don’t really notice too much difference. It is manageable, or you think it is,” he says.

In the space of 18 months, he had racked up £40,000 of debt and was in serious need of help.

Newport is not the only person spending heavily on the plastic as personal debt levels rise in the UK for the first time since the financial crisis, and this is worrying the Bank of England.