A new report has found that over £29 billion is outstanding in unpaid IOU’s across the British Isles making the UK a ‘nation of scroungers’.

The report surveyed 1,000 Brits across the country, and almost a quarter (24%) claimed they were owed money by scroungers – the average amount being an astounding £2,564.38 per person.

So what gets scrounged most often? The most popular items were:

• Snacks - fizzy drinks, chocolates etc (36%)
• Money (35%)
• Pints & alcohol beverages (30%)
• Books & magazines (30%)
• Compact discs (27%)
• Cigarettes (25%)
• Clothes (19%)

The internet bank, Egg who commissioned the research calculated that the ‘scrounge mountain’, which represents the amount of owed items in the UK each year, would be a mountain 683 feet high making it taller than Nelson’s Column (202 feet), Big Ben (316 feet), the Great Pyramid of Giza (450 feet), and even the BT Tower (625 feet). The base of the mountain would be the equivalent of nearly seven football pitches.

When asked why they scrounged, almost a third of people (32%) claimed it was because they know they can get away with it.

A further third claimed they were confident their friends and family would always bail them out - scrounging was as easy option for them. Children were accused of being the biggest scroungers, but 35% of adults pointed the finger at friends of both genders as the next worst culprits (25% and 19% respectively).

Jerry Toher, UK Managing Director, Egg said: “Amazingly the amount of money that the nation owe each other is equivalent to the amount needed to plug the savings gap.”

“It goes to show that a pound lent here and there really does add up; we’ve all heard the old phrase look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.”

But could it be different?

Egg says that scrounging could be over for good with Egg Pay, an internet service for mailing money.

Egg Pay allows money to be sent to anyone with an e-mail address and a UK bank account and there is no need for recipients to register for Egg Pay to receive a payment.

Anyone logging on can set up an Egg Pay account. To send money an e-mail is sent to the recipient and after answering a personal security question, set by the sender, the recipient can accept the transaction by entering the details of the bank account into which they would like the money paid.

But will it work? Or will scroungers always be scroungers? Jerry Toher says: “our service allowing customers to email money to friends & family just by knowing their e-mail address could spell the end for the scrounger.”

“We are a nation of givers and takers, but now after a night out on the town the takers can simply email their mates the money they’ve borrowed or owe for pint and cigarettes and help reduce the size of the scrounge mountain,” continues Jerry.

About Egg’s ‘scrounge mountain’:

• The mountain would contain £4.44bn of snacks – or a chocolate bar that’s over 4½ billion feet long.
• It would also contain £4.32bn in cash – that’s a £5 note with an area of three square miles.
• This would be topped up by almost 1.9 billion pints (to compensate for £3.7 billion worth of alcohol ‘borrowed’ per year).
• Over 463 million paperback books would be added to the mountain for the £3.7 billion worth of reading material scrounged each year (that’s a tower of books over 19 million feet high).
• £2.35 billion worth of clothes increase our mountain ever more.
• 222 million CDs make the mountain even greater - over £3 billion music & video items are borrowed each year.
• A 40 billion feet long cigarette would make up for the £3.09 billion scrounged each year by smokers (that 32 times the distance to the moon).
• A further £4.56 billion worth of items make up the completed mountain – Egg expect this to include condoms, stamps, pens, chewing gum and make-up.