Applying for two smaller personal loans instead of one bigger one: good idea?

Brie

Given the additional information then perhaps 1 smaller loan now would be a doable thing.  Use it to pay off some cards and then shut them down.  So say you were allowed £5k because they think you can afford £23k.  And having cleared £5k of card debt and got rid of £5k of credit availability you are back to £18k.  Wait a few months for your credit history to be updated.  Then get another small load and repeat as above.  

But if you have the money coming in 12 months maybe it's not worth the fuss?

Superhoopza

If the OP only needed/wanted one smaller loan, then they wouldn't ask the question about two. Secondly if they need it now and not in 12 months, giving a solution for a few months time is not what the OP is looking for.

Nebulous2

Breaking up a big loan into parts has been discussed here repeatedly in the past. Sometimes splitting it between a couple. 

A sweet spot for personal loans was between £7.5 and £15k. Above that had fewer lenders and generally less favourable rates. 

The risk of taking two is that you get a decent deal for one and then either don't get the other, or get it at a higher rate. 

I took over £30k in debt to stooze over a weekend pre-pandemic. That went through ridiculously easily at the time. Of course reporting of hard searches may have tightened up since then, but it is quite legitimate for people to make more than one application for a loan as a means of testing rates, rather than to take both. 

I've no recent experience, but most of the replies seem to be telling you that you shouldn't, rather than how to. Their views may be worth considering.