Debt Advice Services

Sarah Russell Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), who spoke incredibly passionately about the difficulties of debt. There is a lot of debt in my community, which appears, on the face of it, to be relatively affluent, but one of the problems is that people feel a huge compulsion to maintain that appearance. I have spoken to a lot of people on the doorstep, and in the course of the submission that we made as a constituency to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, about the fact that people are really struggling and finding it incredibly difficult.

In areas such as mine, where there is not a perception of poverty, there are simply no services to assist people who need help. My constituency has no citizens advice bureau anywhere, no law centre—nothing. When people have difficulties, they therefore do not know where to turn. We need to do the best we can to improve civil legal aid. Citizens advice bureaux were partly funded by local government, which was cut, and partly through the legal advice work they did that was charged at legal aid rates. Unfortunately, since those are now so difficult to work under, all those advice services have been decimated.

My local citizens advice bureau spoke to me—I say local; it is not in the constituency, though it can occasionally do some in-person transitory work—about how important it is to see people face to face. It said vulnerable people, older people and others might in theory have online access, but actually cannot go through a complex system to resolve their debt without that consistent face-to-face assistance. We need to aspire not just to improve telephone and online services, but to ensure that in-person advice is provided.

My hon. Friend briefly touched on the quality of advice that people are receiving and the fact that although the Financial Conduct Authority regulates the products that people are being sold around debt reduction—they are products—there is a real problem of mis-selling them, despite the theoretical regulation. Unfortunately, regulation is only as good as the enforcement. It is important that we keep discussing the matter and that we bring real change to the advice landscape because our residents need us to.