Paul Calvert spoke with Community Money Advice

Claire Daniels

Community Money Advice (CMA) is a national charity that for 11 years has enabled community groups to establish local, free to client, face to face debt advice services, through the provision of a range of services. They now have a network of over 100 affiliated advice centres across the country. Each year these centres help thousands of people escape from the blight of indebtedness by providing free, unconditional, fully confidential advice and practical support to people from all walks of life. To find out more Paul Calvert spoke with Claire Daniels.

Paul: What is Community Money Advice?

Claire: We're an organisation that helps centres and churches all across the country set up money advice centres within their communities to help their communities out of debt.

Paul: Are there many people in debt at the moment?

Claire: We're getting more and more people; it's just escalating like crazy and we're seeing people coming through our doors at a massive rate. With benefit cuts and other problems it's just going to get worse.

Paul: How does debt affect a family?

Claire: A debt will affect a family or an individual in so many ways. It can lead to relationship breakdowns; it can lead to depression and mental health problems. Obviously there are issues of not having enough money to provide for children's needs; it just has an impact on a whole family's life and a whole community, ultimately.

Paul: When somebody's in debt, is it easy to get out of it?

Claire: If you're trying to do it yourself, it can be pretty tough. When we do it for somebody or help somebody with it, it can be a long process, it can be a tough process, but actually we can do it and we can help somebody get right through it and get them out of debt. That's what we do and that's what we aim to do every day.

Paul: What would you do to get somebody out of debt?

Claire: Physically what we do is we will write to the creditors, everybody that the person owes money to and they will go away with a budget that we'll prepare for them and start to live within their budget. We'll get some breathing space and then we'll negotiate with the creditors what they can afford to pay back. When we're doing it as a third party it's so much easier than trying to do it yourself. It really works. If somebody needs to go insolvent, bankrupt, then we help them with that; we just find the best option for them.

Paul: Are payday loans and credit cards a good idea?

Claire: No! No! People that use credit cards, well, that's great, but for most people you just end up with spiralling debt and payday loans, just don't touch them. We're just seeing a massive, massive increase of people with multiple payday loans because they just can't pay them off and the problem is, once you've got a payday loan, getting a mortgage becomes a real issue and also they just spiral. It's a bad idea every time, unfortunately.

Paul: What sort of things are people getting into debt with in the UK?