By Richard McKeever
The national Financial Inclusion Champions programme is intended to take forward the work of the Now Let’s Talk Money campaign, and is managed by the DWP as part of the Government’s Financial Inclusion Strategy and Financial Inclusion Fund.
Community Links is leading the development of the champions programme across east and parts of north London.
Financial Inclusion Champion Wai-Fong Pang is based at Community Links and is working to develop and promote financial inclusion services. In this article she comments on the London Debt Summit.
There have been many concerns raised within the advice sector about the impact of the recession on advice services and their clients. So, Capitalise, London’s Debt Advice Partnership and the GLA organised the Debt Summit, which took place yesterday, to address some of these issues. There were a range of speakers invited including the Deputy Mayor of London, funders from both the statutory and charitable sector and the chief executive of a voluntary advice agency. But, despite their diversity they were all in agreement about the need for a co-ordinated and strategic response to the impact of the recession.
Debt advice can deal with the more pressing problems of keeping a roof over someone’s head or the bailiffs from the door, but there are other issues such as redundancy, ill health, relationship breakdown, unreasonable behaviour by creditors and even the tenuous state of advice funding that must also be dealt with.
The report, ‘Up to our neck in it’ was also unveiled at the Summit. Despite the many depressing statistics and figures, the one that really shocked me was the impact this recession is having on the self-employed. Since 2006, Capitalise has seen a 300% increase in average debt levels of these clients, from £10,000 to £44,000. No work – no money, and to compound the problem they also have difficulty accessing benefits because of the need to provide proof of income with a set of accounts prepared by an accountant. The way that I see it, if you can’t afford to pay your rent or mortgage you probably can’t afford to pay an accountant to prepare your accounts!
The BBC journalist, Liz Barclay, was also in attendance, she was a manager of a Citizens Advice Bureau 20 years ago and remembers dealing with clients in debt and dealing with the impact of the previous recession. She asked the question ‘Has there been any improvement since the last recession?’ Not one person put up their hand and said ‘yes’ there had.
I really hope that something good will come from this Summit, there is talk of the formation of a London Debt Strategy group to work cross-sector to find solutions to the problems.
Let’s hope that they succeed.
Wai-Fong Pang
Financial Inclusion Champion – east/north London
