Over 4.2 million credit card holders are still paying off the debts they ran up through paying for last Christmas, new research shows.

Figures from price comparison service MoneyExpert.com reveal that the average time taken to clear credit card debts following Christmas 2005 was 2.6 months.

However, almost half of British credit card holders did not put any debt on their cards due to festive spending, while a further 17 per cent took a month or less to clear their balances, only incurring a minimal amount of interest.

MoneyExpert.com said that getting into debt was fine as long as people had the means to get out of it.

It was tempting to put festive spending on the plastic when bills were mounting up, and everybody intends to clear the debt as soon as possible, yet many of us don't, they added.

Figures from the British Bankers' Association for October suggested that consumers were turning away from credit cards and towards personal loans, with net lending on loans and overdrafts rising by £0.8 billion, while underlying net lending on credit cards fell by £0.4 billion.

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