The Debt Advice Diaries

I have never been in problem debt. I am white, British, middle class, and healthy. These are advantages I'm very aware of, particularly when, as is true most days, I am working with do not have them. But even so, I sometimes have to stop myself throwing my hands up and shouting, Well why did you do that? This week, I finally see a client I've been trying to arrange an appointment with for a while. Her elderly mother also attends. There's a whole lot of letters (we just want your most recent water bill, not the last three years' worth!), and in amongst them is a letter from her housing provider, dated two weeks ago. It turns out that in January, before she ever contacted us, this client received a Suspended Possession Order (SPO) for rent arrears. And since that SPO, she has made no payments at all. I don't think I physically roll my eyes. I scrap my plans for the appointment and instead we spend most of it talking to the housing provider and setting up a Standing O...

No, I don't really know how you're expected to live on £324.84 a month, never mind repay your debts. No, I don't know how you'll get by while you wait for the outcome of your PIP claim. Yes, I know that could be months. Yes, it's stupid that you're in debt because you have no money and bailiffs are going to add £75, then £235, to that debt. No, I can't stop them doing that. No, I can't stop your energy bills going up. No, it's not fair that your abusive husband didn't pay the rent on your joint tenancy before you moved out and you're the one getting chased for it. And no, it's also not fair that because he has died/moved abroad/evaded the tenative approaches of the Child Maintenance Service you just don't get anything. No, we can't appeal the energy company trust fund decision. No, it's not fair that the council would rather let you get evicted and spend money processing a homelessness application than give you a Discretio...

There are two types of clients with bailiffs. There are the clients who are terrified. The clients for whom the idea of some aggressive men turning up at their door demanding payment is simply unthinkable. These clients can be tough, because as a debt adviser I can't guarantee I can prevent this, but I want the client to still trust me and believe I can help them. And then there are the clients who are used to it.  This week, I saw one of the latter, and it broke my heart. She comes in with the stereotypical bag of letters - although in a slight departure from the norm, it's cloth rather than plastic, and there's also a ringbinder from several years ago when another local agency tried to set up payment arrangements with the council. When I ask if she managed to keep those up, she laughs. In amongst the papers that cover my desk are several bailiff letters going back the last few years. I start to explain about bailiffs' powers of entry, and she cuts me off. "Yeah, ...

Another fairly quiet week, albeit one punctuated by continued bureaucratic frustrations. Given that the council is incapable of replying to a query in 30 days, it seems a little rich that it requests the return of an income & expenditure form (with a payment offer, of course) in 14. The fact is, most of my clients have no money with which to make offers of repayment.Their only income is state benefits, and they have (often large) deficit budgets, which they are making 'work' by missing payments on various bills. Quite what the council thinks it will achieve by sending in bailiffs in these cases, beyond heaping misery on already stressed and distressed residents, is beyond me. The Freeman-on-the-Land from the other week has gone quiet, seemingly unhappy about my differing interpretation of contracts and liability. I will continue to offer him a service, but I doubt he will take it. I've also had a lot of no-shows this week, mostly from new clients. That's frustrating...

The news this week has been grim. An appalling increase in energy bills, and a government that is responding with a badly-targeted council tax rebate and a £200 loan. Still, we carry on. I enjoy writing a particularly stern letter to the council's bailiff company who, not for the first time, have decided to continue with enforcement action while my multiple emails providing evidence of my client's vulnerabilities sit unanswered. That's about it this week, but with the energy price increases and continued uncertainty for most of the debt advice sector caused by the Money and Pension Service's incompetence, it's feeling like a matter of time before things get worse.

A tiring week, not helped by the local council's approach to enforcement of council tax. They automatically throw cases across to the bailiffs (sorry, 'enforcement agents'), even when the resident in question's vulnerabilities are undoubtedly known to the council. The problem is, the people in the council who know about these vulnerabilities are in a different department. It should be basic administrative competence to have different parts of a local authority share information about residents. So why does the council tax enforcement team not know that Resident X, who has lived for decades in a council property, has mental health issues that a bailiff visit could greatly worsen? It's all arse about face. Rather than the council sharing information internally, or doing any sort of investigation, they send in the bailiffs and rely on that client approaching an advice agency who then informs the council. It is cruel, and it inevitably means ill people suffer. Perhaps n...

 "You're more like a social worker, aren't you? And more use." So says one of my clients this week, and it makes my day. To be honest, this week I've really felt like one - I've helped a client set up a bank account, called the pension service to make sure a panicked client's request for his pension to be paid fortnightly has gone through, and checked up on a couple of others to see if they've managed to set up their agreed council tax repayments and so on. This is the sort of service that my clients (and many others) need. But unfortunately it's not what you can expect with most advice services. The reason I'm able to do this is that my organisation is free of the choking bureaucracy of the Money and Pensions Service, which expects advisers to see eight new clients a week and write each of them a tailored letter that can run to 40 or more pages. Try fitting in any casework around that without working well beyond your contracted hours. And if y...