Don’t expect your Housing Association to answer the phone just because they emailed to say they’d evict you if you didn’t phone them.
Your Registered Social Landlord sends you an email advising that you are close to being evicted.
Your rent arrears are nearly £6000. The email tells you that you have to contact the Housing Association *urgently* or else.
Your frightened of ringing them. You don’t want to be evicted but where are you going to find £6k? You’re on Universal Credit and you’ve been sanctioned, so your rent won’t get paid and you’ll get £81 this month. To live on. £81. For a month.
You go to see your debt adviser and she rings the Housing Association on the number they’ve given you for this urgent call.
The automated message tells you that your call is important to them. It then tells you there is an average wait time of 30 minutes to speak to someone.
After 35 minutes. Someone answers the call. And immediately the call terminates. The debt adviser has another client in 20 minutes so what do you do now?
Meet Louise, a thirty-something single woman. On Universal Credit. Adrift in a sea of debt, which is swirling around and threatening to sink her; loans, cards, mobile phone debts, energy debts, Council Tax, rent, and the inevitable Tax Credits overpayment from a decade ago. She had a job, a good one, but was exposed to a lot of Covid back in 2020 and caught it 4 times.
She also had a partner, but unfortunately it was one of those ‘partners’ who believes in capital punishment and didn’t restrain himself when the red mist descended. Eventually, the police got involved and the court.
Months of this horrible drama and sickness led to a P45 and an ex-partner in prison. And so much debt.
About a year ago, Louise was so desperate for help she responded to an advert on Facebook and ended up with an IVA. It didn’t include the rent or Council Tax arrears and the income and expenditure produced by the lead generator could have been written by Charles Dickens. (They were called Aidan Finance and they’ve since gone bust, by the way - AKA unaccountable.)
Louise was desperate for the ‘81% debt write off’ promised by the Facebook advert. She didn’t know about any alternative debt solutions but AF quickly talked her through them and explained that an IVA was her best option because it meant that she would pay her creditors something back – unlike, say, one of those highly undesirable Debt Relief Orders (which just wipes the debts and provides a fresh start for a one-off payment of £90).
By the time the Insolvency Practitioner (IP) was running through that same set of alternative debt solutions over the phone (it took all of 7 minutes – I’ve listened to it) Louise flatly refused all of them except for the IVA because she ‘wanted to pay her creditors something back’. She repeated this without hesitation or deviation, exactly as she told me she had been coached to do. The IP accepted this without question – of course they did. I wouldn’t have, nor would any other decent debt adviser. We would ask…why?
Louise made 2 monthly payments to the IVA before giving up. Rent arrears were mounting even then, while the IVA payments went squarely on paying the IP’s considerable fees. (Creditors got zero). The Housing Association was already threatening eviction so Louise’s friend – a former client of mine – advised her to contact me.
What followed over a period of many months was the termination of the IVA, a full investigation of Louise’s debts (in which a further £21k of debt was found that the IP missed), a complaint to the Insolvency Practitioners Association, which typically went nowhere, but instead heaped blame on Louise for not identifying herself as ‘vulnerable’ and not challenging the nonsense she was fed by Aidan Finance. She didn’t know it was nonsense till she met me. Why would she?
Most people aren’t experts in insolvency but regulators expect them to be. Regulators believe that debtors are on a level playing field with insolvency practitioners and lead generators when it comes to IVAs. They’re wilfully denying reality if you ask me, because the gravy train is struggling as it is and might come to a standstill otherwise.
Finally, Louise applied for bankruptcy (debts over £36000 by this stage) – the £680 fee was paid by a grant and being in receipt of Universal Credit meant the Official Receiver approved the bankruptcy without even a telephone appointment, and definitely no income payments arrangements.
Unsurprisingly, Louise never showed the slightest concern to me about her creditors and the possibility of them not getting paid something back. She was far more concerned about keeping a roof over her head.
Although she feels she is finally getting some semblance of normal life back, the threat of eviction still looms and we can’t actually speak to anyone at the Housing Association to discuss the implications of Louise’s bankruptcy and the idea she has for avoiding arrears in the future.
Louise desperately wants to downsize to a property that is more affordable for her, without the bedroom tax which has plagued her since losing her job and relying on benefits to pay the rent. There is an ideal property available, with a tenant in it that needs Louise’s extra bedroom and wants to swap with her. The solution exists.
So after I was cut off, I filled in an online form to complain about the terminated phone call, and to explain about the bankruptcy and potential house-swap situation. 10 days later I received a reply that said they had ‘noted their file’.
It doesn’t need to be this hard does it? I’m thinking here about those organisations whose employees can’t give you their direct number because then you would be able to actually return their call, or those that don’t use email because it’s too quick and convenient, those who can’t put you through to their supervisor because no-one with authority or accountability occupies the same planet they’re on. And so on.
Any debt adviser will tell you that at every point when progress could be made there will be an organisation or company (energy, housing, Council, the DWP, a creditor etc) who makes the simple art of negotiation and information exchange by dialogue excruciatingly difficult to the point of impossibility. And we are then distracted and obliged to lodge complaints and follow them up when they are ignored, when all we want to do is help the client reach a solution.
I believe a more honest recorded hold message would be ‘please don’t call us, we haven’t the time, skill or willingness to help you even if you hold on for an hour. We might just terminate the call straight away because we can – without fear of repercussions – because you actually don’t matter to us. At all.’
