Owing Everyone: Debt Advice in the UK’s Time of Austerity

Deborah James

doi:10.1080/00141844.2019.1687544

Abstract

ABSTRACT Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market (those with debt to commercial creditors) or the state (for those receiving welfare benefits – a person may owe the local council or tax office because she is in arrears or was ‘overpaid’). Seeking clarification or counsel from advisers means entering a world where payments often seem to be automated and where the state is ‘giving with one hand and taking away with the other’. Yet payments have a human, even moral/ethical aspect and must be negotiated. The adviser helps the debtor to close the flood gates through which these payments flow, or temporarily to reduce the cascade to a trickle. Under austerity, with legal aid and other funding withdrawn, the advice sector is performing the government’s work of care. Agencies must identify new wellsprings of care and concern, or intensify the demands placed upon existing ones.

Highlights

Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market or the state
Their wide-ranging analyses illustrate the links between state debts and those owed to private creditors; the enforced repayment of public debt exploits those at the bottom of the pile, since it is repayments by the latter that serve to bail out the bankers and/or that find their way into the hands of financialised capital
Working under the assumption that public debt in austerity times works its way down the system to extract repayments from the ordinary man in the street and eventually finds its way into the hands of financialised capital or bail out the bankers, it could be claimed that the very definition of a ‘priority debt’, in which precedence is given to taxes owed to local councils, the national revenue office, or the government’s welfare agencies over monies owed to credit card companies and the like, serves to enable such flows of extraction

Summary

Introduction

Under UK austerity, people are obliged to pay up: either to the market (those with debt to commercial creditors) or the state (for those receiving welfare benefits – a person may owe the local council or tax office because she is in arrears or was ‘overpaid’). Mainly in the form of the local authorities which administer some of the benefit system and collect council tax, have increased exponentially as enforcement powers have intensified (Kirwan 2018).

Results

Conclusion