When you think of people in debt, what do you imagine? Irresponsible people who leave telephones ringing and hide from debt collectors, or people faced with an impossible situation?
In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Ryan Davey, author of The Personal Life of Debt, about the true, everyday lives of indebted people.
They discuss the people Ryan met during his fieldwork on a southern English housing estate, the reality of living on the ‘never-never’, and what changes, to debt itself and society as a whole, are needed to break this vicious cycle.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Ryan Davey is a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
The Personal Life of Debt by Ryan Davey is available to read open access on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:55 – What was your experience of Woldham during your research?
7:52 – Did you experience any class tension?
10:07 – How can debt be worse now than during the 2008 financial crash?
17:08 – What is ‘living on the never-never’ and what does it mean to different people?
25:46 – Are these communities perfect prey for credit?
32:19 – How does the rescue mindset of child protection manifest in a place like Woldham?
38:35 – What affect did right to buy, and other similar policies, have on working-class communities?
44:34 – Why would debt advisors have negative views of debtors?
51:03 – What changes are needed to break this unending cycle of debt?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Richard Kemp: You’re listening to the Transforming Society podcast. I’m Richard Kemp, and on this episode I’m joined by Ryan Davey, lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University, working across anthropology and sociology. Ryan’s new book, ‘The Personal Life of Debt: Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain’, published by Bristol University Press, is an academic, evidence based ethnography of the inequalities of modern British life.
The book investigates debt, who owes it and where it comes from. It’s also a highly personal book. Ryan spent 18 months living on a housing estate in southern England. During his time there, he lodged with residents and got to know firsthand the true experiences of living with debt from the people living with it, to the debt advisors trying to help, to the financial loan companies who prey on the vulnerable.
Ryan’s writing gives these residents life and character, something that a straightforward textbook could never achieve. There’s humour and love, depression and failure, and so often hope. Through his many interviews, Ryan moves beyond the stories of bailiffs and payday loans to reveal to humanity with the everyday lives of indebted people. Ryan Davey, welcome to the Transforming Society podcast.
Ryan Davey: Hi, Rich, good to see you. Thanks so much and thanks so much for that very generous introduction and for taking the time to read the book as well. I’m really grateful.
RK: Absolute pleasure and such an important book, I’m so pleased that you wrote it. And I learned… I learned so much about, as I said in the intro, like I learned so much about the actual people behind the debt and how the, the headlines and the sensationalism and, you know, all that kind of stuff like it.
Just that there’s always there’s always a person behind the story. And so often, so often things get mixed up or even just co-opted or, you know, just sometimes you just don’t know. And it was really enlightening to actually hear the human stories.
RD: Thanks. That’s really good to hear.
RK: So as a major part of your research, you lived on a housing estate, as I said, in a deprived part of southern England. You used the pseudonym of Woldham for the town’s name. Can you tell us your story? How did you end up living in Woldham, and what was your experience like?
RD: Yeah. Of course. So I gave the housing estate the name of Woldham. I also use this term housing estate really to refer to a neighbourhood that’s got a very high level of social housing. There’s some private renters there as well, and a minority of people who own their homes. And there’s about 5000 people that live in Woldham. I don’t give the name of the city that it’s in for reasons of anonymity in research.
I ended up spending time there for my research, because I wanted to find a neighbourhood where there was a debt advice centre kind of located within the neighbourhood. And there was a couple of options that I had from contacts that I had already. One was in the East End of London and another one was in a provincial city in the south of England.
And the housing estate was on the outskirts of the city. And I thought, I feel like I’ve seen and heard about class and inequality in the East End of London, and I at the time heard less about inequality in more provincial areas of Britain. So that was part of the reason for selecting, Woldham as the field site. And then in terms of actually living there, the first… so my first kind of stint of fieldwork, the biggest period was for a year, just over a year.
And the first six months or so were quite challenging, to be honest, like on a personal level. I didn’t know anyone when I moved there other than one person who was a manager of the Debt Advice service. So I had several attempts at trying to get to know people I can be a bit shy, like personally at times. So, that was part of my attempt to get to know people.
And I put up fliers around the estate advertising the research. One thing that really seemed to actually be a bit of a breakthrough was I asked the manager of the social club if I could go around and be a bit of a nuisance and ask the people who had gone for a drink in the social club if they’d be willing to take part in my research somehow.
And many people had better things to do, very understandably. There was 1 or 2 tables of people who were quite open to talking to me there, and then I followed up with them. And really, it was through getting to know… that was a group of about eight people and starting off from them and kind of snowballing outwards got to know quite a large number of people who were living on, on the housing estate.
I also interviewed a number of debt advice clients, who I met through the advice services, but it was really the, the more kind of residential traditional ethnography part of my fieldwork was just trying to get to know local residents. I also kind of tried to take part in community events, so I went to residents association meetings.
I learned karate in a local karate class for a few months. I did not get very good at it, but I tried my best anyway. And, went to a support group that a local resident had set up for parents of children with additional needs. Went to a local community time bank, where people exchange favours for one another and through like a variety of kind of community based activities. Gradually got to know more people who were living on the estate. So like I said, the first six months were kind of hard work in terms of trying to get to know people. And then it kind of took on a bit of a momentum of its own, and it became quite easy to have conversations with people day to day.
RK: The conversations that come up in your book, they… it sounds like, I was getting a feeling like, wow, everyone seems to really trust Ryan and wants to talk to him. But for the first six months, did you did you find that there were some people who were suspicious of you for the beginning? Maybe they were always suspicious of you?
RD: Yeah, definitely. So most of what I write about is from the people who were quite open, and some people were open from the get go, and other people were initially a bit wary or hesitant, and then the trust kind of developed gradually. And then some people gave me a wide berth the whole way through, and that could be because there were things that they didn’t want to talk about, or they were maybe sceptical, understandably, about who I was working for and why I wanted to know about people’s lives.
Or it may just be that they had more pressing demands on their time, which all those things are completely understandable obviously. I heard like after my research, I heard from a couple of residents that kind of said, “Oh, it wasn’t anything personal, but we were we were involved in some kind of complicated things at the time, and it wasn’t easy for us to talk about it.”
So there’s a variety of reasons why people might be open or less open to, to talking to a researcher. And I think, I mentioned this word ethnography. So that’s the word that we use in anthropology, in sociology and across the social sciences for a method of research that’s based on getting to know people over a prolonged period of time so as to develop relationships of trust and familiarity and that’s kind of the beauty of the method that if you show an interest in people’s lives over that prolonged period of time, it’s kind of amazing.
Like the relationship that can develop. Part of that as well was that my, I refer to the people that I worked with as my interlocutors, so the people that I spoke to, my interlocutors knew as much about my personal life as I knew about theirs. So there’s kind of like a two way exchange of information.
RK: Did you did you find, because you talk a bit about your own class history in the book. And then of course you’re going, you’re going to live. You lived in a housing estate, which is, you know, very, very much a working class housing estate. Did you find any, any kind of friction at all between your class their class or anything like that?
RD: That’s a really interesting question. I think by and large, people were far too polite in general to kind of like, comment on class differences in a way that might come off as like, I don’t know, people having kind of reservations about me, even though I was kind of like expecting that and open to it.
But people were very often also reluctant to speak and think about class difference in an explicit way. This is something that might be quite localized to this particular housing estate. I don’t think it’s kind of general to like working class neighbourhoods across the UK by any stretch, but there was certainly a kind of investment in ideas of meritocracy among most of the residents that I met, where talking about class as a reason why someone might have a more comfortable life was almost seen at times as like making excuses for yourself, for why your life isn’t the way you want it to be.
I don’t agree with those meritocratic ideas in the sense that I don’t believe it’s true that everybody has equal opportunities in Britain today. I think the promises of meritocracy are quite misleading because of that, that like, if you do have a more comfortable start in life, which I have been lucky to have, then that can give you advantages like give you access to advantages in later life much more easily.
But I was surprised to find that many of the residents that I spoke to were kind of reluctant to say something like that or to agree with it, and I had some quite interesting, nuanced conversations with residents where we kind of spoke about this in in some depth. And I write about some of those conversations, too.
RK: After the 2008 financial crash, many, many people lost their homes, their businesses. In 2025, you say that household debt in Britain stands higher now than it did during that financial crash. People are borrowing money to pay rent, energy bills, council tax. How can things be worse now than they were during the biggest economic downturn in recent history?
RD: Yeah, this is a super interesting question. And I would say for my research, I’m not claiming that things are either better or worse overall now than they were during the global financial crisis in 2008. I think it would be a really interesting conversation about how you would start to try and establish whether, overall things are worse or better now than they were in 2008.
For me, the key question would be like, better for whom or worse for whom? So when we talk about things being better or worse, who are we actually, who do we have in mind? And if the UK’s economy in terms of like GDP is doing better overall, this doesn’t mean that everyone in the UK is doing better.
So we know that the standard ways that we think and talk about how things are going economically, which is through aggregate measures like GDP, those measures tell us little about levels of inequality. This is also reflected in the way that our main economic policy institutions, like the Bank of England, do not consider it any of their business at all to address inequality.
Bank of England considers it outside its remit to look at or try to alleviate inequality, other than if inequality might affect stability, like financial stability at a macro economic level. Like we can obviously think whether that’s a good or bad thing, that that’s not part of the Bank of England’s remit. So and again, at an aggregate level, I do talk about how levels of household debt in terms of outstanding borrowing is higher now in absolute terms than it was in 2008, and that’s true.
The relative measure of debt relative to people’s income levels. Those have been falling. So the amount of debt people owe compared to how much money is coming in has actually been falling. But again, that’s a measure that’s at an aggregate level. And it doesn’t tell us anything about how different kind of socioeconomic groups are faring today in terms of how affordable their debt repayments are.
So I think one way that research can be really, really valuable is to go beyond the limitations of these aggregate measures like GDP or economic growth, or even overall debt to income levels to investigate how different socioeconomic groups are faring.
RK: Right. As you were saying, Ryan, that measuring GDP of a country is just saying how good our economy is doing. It’s not talking about anybody actually on the ground. Like it’s not actually saying, how are people living? It’s just saying, is the money in this country higher or lower than another countries money?
RD: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t tell us very much about how varied and uneven the picture is for the people who live within the society that’s kind of included within the economy, like basically within that nation. Economies are usually kind of defined in national terms, right? So I think it’s helpful to go beyond the limitations of aggregate measures like GDP.
And there’s lots of ways that you can do that. My research does it in quite a high level of depth. So the kind of I think the strength of the style of research I do is depth rather than breadth necessarily, and seeing things that we wouldn’t possibly be able to see if we were just taking that kind of broad but kind of surface level snapshot.
And I do this by looking at one particular community. It’s a community of people who are mainly living on low incomes and also insecure or precarious incomes. And I’m not assuming that this community is typical of all communities who are also in that income group. But I’m trying to think quite carefully about how people in the neighbourhood that I call Woldham, how people in that neighbourhood might be typical in some ways or quite unusual and unique in other ways.
So some things that I think are quite widespread are the inequalities So for instance, the fact that in the neighbourhood where I was working, most people’s incomes were not wholly reliant on wage work. So many people were in work. Some people moved in and out of work. There was no one I met who fit under the stereotype of like multi-generationally unemployed. Everyone that I met.
Well, no, not everyone, but the vast majority of people I met. If they were working, their wages were not enough to make ends meet. And because of this, people turn to other sources of income, such as benefits, including in-work benefits, not just out of work benefits and credit, as well as kind of informal practices like cash in hand work.
And I think this situation is probably quite widespread in Britain today. Like we know from statistical research that the living wage, there are so many people in Britain today living below a kind of reasonable living wage. So there’s many people in this situation where wages aren’t enough for making ends meet. And so there’s lots of people who are in the same boat of having to turn to other sources of income as well.
And the thing I really focus in, in depth on is what then happens when you have to turn to other sources of income to make ends meet. So what happens, so like specifically borrowing and credit and debt. So what happens where you’re borrowing money not in order to invest in a brighter future necessarily, but because it’s one of very few sources of income to tie you over until the next payday.
So what are some of the consequences of that? And I would say the principal consequence of that reliance on borrowing is that you then become exposed to the risk of enforcement and the risk of enforcement becomes part of the fabric of your day to day life. And so much of what the book looks at is, how do people make that situation liveable?
So what do people do in order to live with a fairly continual prospect of legal enforcement, of a risk of being taken to court and being forced to pay debts, a risk of bailiffs coming around to your home to try to remove possessions in lieu of repayment of a debt. So that’s the situation that I’m particularly interested in.
So I focus on one community. I think it has implications for many, many more people around the UK today as well.
RK: I would definitely say so. I was reading it, and yeah, it felt like Woldham was speaking to so many, so many different places either that I know personally or that I’ve heard of over, you know, many, many years. One phrase that comes up a lot in your book is living on the never-never.
One resident, Jason, I loved your relationship with Jason and Becky, I believe it is, just like they seemed so…By the end of the book, I felt like you and Jason and Becky were best mates basically, I loved that relationship. So, Jason, he says this, this phrase the living on the never-never with a cheeky grin, he seems to seems to say it with a cheeky grin while another neighbour, you’re talking to at some point through the book, they use it.
They use that same phrase, but as a derogatory term. Could you explain this phrase, please? Living on the never-never and, what it means to different people.
RD: Yeah, definitely. Thanks for picking up on it as a key term that was used by people in this neighbourhood. Would love to just briefly respond as well, to the point you mentioned about how the book focuses on the stories of a relatively small group of people. So there were five individuals whose experiences I focus on in in depth throughout the five main chapters of the book, and they include Jason and Becky, who are a couple, and several other individuals.
And I made the choice to write about this smaller number of individuals in depth for kind of specific reasons, which is that I interviewed just under 20 debt advise clients, and that taught me about the kinds of approaches to debt that’s encouraged by publicly funded institutions like debt advice services. But I found that the people who I met as residents on the housing estate spoke about their debts in a very, very different way.
And I learned from a relatively small number of people about a way of approaching debts, and a way of responding to really the whole coercive apparatus of the British state. That’s different from a lot of what we’ve found from existing research on debt. So I wanted to kind of focus on those people’s stories in depth and also kind of juxtapose them next to the debt advice clients and next to the other residents of the neighbourhood.
In terms of this term, living on the never I mean, it follows on from what I was just saying that there was like a distinctive approach to debt that I found from talking to people outside this institutional setting of a debt advice service. And I was surprised to find, actually, that people spoke about debts in quite specific, careful ways when they went to seek advice from a professional debt advice charity, and the way that people spoke about their debts outside the debt advice service was just very different a lot of the time.
For instance, in the debt advice service, people spoke about their debts almost as a confession, like, “Oh, I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve got myself into a real mess. I’m going to learn my lesson” or “I’ve been really stupid. I’m going to sort this out. I’m going to be more responsible.” There is that feeling of confessing to having done something wrong, and there is a tone of seriousness in the way that people spoke about their debts there.
So I was quite surprised to find when I spoke to the residents of this housing estate, that often there was humour in the way that people spoke about their debts. So people might joke about having a terrible credit score as a way of trying to make light of these things that are often seen as very serious problems and can have serious consequences as well. But trying to make that experience more liveable.
RK: Ah, yeah, there was one- I remember one interaction between a couple of neighbours, one of them laughing at the other neighbour, saying, oh, you’re going to have to, you want to sell your Xbox to me again, and I’ll give it back to you at a rate in a couple of weeks time. Like he’s always selling his Xbox. Something along those lines, no?
RD: Yeah, that did happen. So it happened with a few people where it would be like an object of humour, or people would make fun of someone because of that person’s apparent weakness for pawning their valuables. And initially I was kind of like a bit baffled about what the, whether they were just making fun of that person, like being hard up and struggling financially.
And then I sort of gradually realized that the humour was very subtle, and it was about a shared sense that having the weakness for credit is looked down on by the wider society and seen as something that’s lacking in responsibility. But among these groups of friends and neighbours, the humour about, oh, yeah, he’s always pawning his Xbox or jewellery or whatever it might be, is a way of trying to communicate that that’s fine. That’s very understandable. We’re not judging you if that’s something that you do like within not the neighbourhood as a whole necessarily, but within our kind of social groups, we see that as a perfectly kind of okay thing to, to do on a regular basis.
I can come back to the question about living on the never-never. So people use this term in a couple of different ways. Sometimes people said those people are living on the never-never as a way to mean that someone was borrowing money without any intention of paying anything back. So there was like a full intention to avoid any repayment whatsoever. For example, there was one day when I noticed on the estate that there were a lot of sofas.
Well, not a lot, but maybe 3 or 4 sofas had been discarded over the same weekend on kind of grass verges around the streets. And I mentioned this to a couple of residents, and one resident said it will have been a furniture company doing a buy now, pay later offer, and what those people will have done will be to have bought a sofa on credit, discarded their existing sofa and they’ll be intending to move home before the repayments kick in.
So the intention is to avoid repayment completely. I think… I’m not sure you could be quite so certain about that’s exactly what was going on in that situation. But that was the conclusion that this resident came to about why sofas were being discarded. And that resident said those people are living on the never-never, evil bastards.
So for him, there was a sense that if you take out credit without any intention of repaying it, you were like so morally kind of reprehensible and lacking in responsibility as to be evil. Other people used the same term in a less kind of black and white way. So there was one resident I spoke to who had been trying to repay his bank loans, and his unsecured credit products because he had a hope of getting a mortgage one day, and he felt he had to clear his existing debts to be able to access a mortgage.
And there was one day where he seemed to have kind of changed his mind and come to the view that actually he was never going to be able to pay off his bank loans and his personal loans. And he was kind of starting to feel like mortgage was out of reach for him. And so he spoke about having bought a laptop on hire purchase, hire purchase’s where kind of like rent to buy kind of situation.
So you repay for something in instalments, like buying something on credit. And he said he had a baby son and he said the only thing that my son’s going to get from us when we die is all our debts. And he was kind of joking again, this sort of dark humour that people sometimes had about their debt problems.
And when I spoke to him and other residents more about this particular approach to debts, it actually didn’t seem to be that they were taking out credit with no intention of ever repaying anything. Actually, the approach that most people seem to be taking was, taking out credit, really hoping to avoid enforcement, while also being aware that it might not be possible to keep up all of the repayments to the level of the creditors were demanding.
And this hope of avoiding enforcement was a key ingredient of what people spoke of as living on the never-never. So you’re in a kind of legal grey area where you, you know, that you might be taken to court, but there’s a hope of being able to pay just enough to avoid legal consequences. So that’s that seemed to be actually the people who would speak about living on the never as something that they themselves were doing, rather than as an insult about other people.
The people who spoke about it as something that they themselves were doing seemed to be more this approach of kind of avoiding enforcement, maybe stalling on repayments, but not giving up on repayments altogether.
RK: Is it fair to say that those who are living with all this debt, all this credit, like I was getting a feeling through, through reading the book that a lot of the time they’re going to end up going into debt because you’re saying earlier about how so many, so many people on the estate in the neighbourhood, many of whom are earning wages, but there’s no way that those wages can pay for, you know, just, just a normal life.
And so you’re so are they then kind of like the perfect prey for credit because without credit, just living a normal, comfortable life, it’s basically impossible.
RD: A short answer, yes. I think that’s like I really agree with how you’ve described it. And I would go a bit further by saying that the perfect target for certain kinds of credit and certain kinds of lending, certain kinds of credit products. So there are actually quite old forms of credit that have been taken up by working class communities in Britain for decades, for like much, much longer ago than the real expansion of credit, which happened in the 1980s and since then.
So, going back much earlier in the 20th century, there were things like doorstep lending, hire purchase, mail order catalogues. So there are kind of I don’t want to overstate the novelty of the kind of credit situation that we have today. So there are some long standing forms of credit that have been taken up by working class communities.
There has also been, since the 1980s, a massive expansion of lending to households. And part of how that expansion of credit has happened has been by lending to kind of socioeconomic groups that lenders previously had not lent to, because the lenders felt that those groups were too risky in quotes, often because they’re groups that had low incomes.
So, single parent households, racial minorities, working class people, self-employed people before the 1980s often found it very difficult, if not impossible, to access credit, whereas in this expansion of credit, lenders started lending money to those groups and found those groups like a source of income and a source of profit. And that was helped by the removal of a cap on the amount of interest that lenders can charge.
So the ability of lenders to charge at times astronomical levels of interest enabled that expansion of lending. And just one other thing to say on this is that there’s what’s called a poverty premium on lending, whereby the lower your income, the more expensive credit is. So, I mean, it won’t be a surprise to anybody that if you’re on a lower income or more insecure income, a lender is likely to charge you a much higher level of interest in those products that seem to be taken up by lower income households, like payday loans, doorstep loans traditionally have a higher level of interest, and that means that you’re more likely to default if you take out one of those products and you’re more likely for debt problems to happen.
So there’s kind of a connection between the occurrence of debt problems and enforcement, and some lenders targeting low income households as a source of profit.
RK: These companies sound like monsters. And the, the structures enabling them to do their monstrous activities. They sound like monsters, too.
RD: Yeah, I mean, there are forms of exploitation that I think have been shown really clearly by other people who are working on financial lending and borrowing. So, some researchers have called this financial extraction. Some people call it financial exploitation, some people call it predatory extraction. It’s always describing situations where borrowing money ultimately leaves you worse off and I think it’s important with this not to describe it as an absolute rule.
So there are many people who borrow money and actually become better off through it. For instance, if you take out a mortgage, you repay it, your house increases in value. It’s quite likely that you’ll become better off through that process if you’re fortunate enough to to go through that process. But there are many, many people who become worse off through borrowing, often because of the level of interest that’s charged.
Another caveat to put on the kind of vilification of lenders is that, and this was kind of a surprise to me in my field work, was that a lot of the residents that I spoke to were very grateful that they had access to even these, like what I think of as extortionate or at least exploitative forms of credit.
For instance, there was a, a woman who I got to know who said my doorstep loans agent has always been there for me, so he’s always been someone that I can turn to if a household appliance breaks down and I suddenly need to get hold of a few hundred pounds, or if we don’t have enough money to take us to the next payday, or if we need to buy emergency, if we have some kind of emergency expenditure that we can’t avoid, that actually, credit could be helpful in those situations, but at the same time, people were obviously well aware of the costs of doing so.
So there’s an ambivalence about the role of these forms of credit. And I think that points to the fact that there is a social need for credit. Credit can address gaps in income. It can help people to get from one month to the next, or from one payday to the next. The problems can come in when interest is charged.
Some civilizations, societies through history, have banned interest altogether because of the problems that it can cause. I think penalty fees can also be part of why credit can become harmful, and also the use of coercive measures for enforcement, like bailiffs being able to confiscate household goods, or people being able to be evicted from their homes by force.
These things are part of the potential harms of credit. So it’s not to kind of dismiss the needs that can exist for credit, but we might want to look at alternatives that have been suggested, such as socializing the cost of credit, where you don’t pay a higher level of interest if your income is lower, where that’s kind of the cost of credit is kind of redistributed in a way.
RK: Judgments about parenting, they come up a lot in your interviews. Since 1980, UK child protection has been dominated by a rescue mindset that is suspicious of parents. How does this materialize in a place like Woldham?
RD: Yeah. So the book does have a primary focus on debt, but it also, as you’ve kind of alluded to, looks at other areas of people’s lives where they also faced some prospect of enforcement or they faced some risk of losing something near and dear to them. So I look at the risk of enforcement with debt problems and the risk of bailiffs coming to people’s homes.
And I compare that to tenants and their worries about the risk of eviction, which was a very pervasive anxiety in people’s domestic lives. And then I also compare that to the way parents, especially female residents who had kids, spoke about their concerns about child protection interventions. What’s often called in the UK, children being taken into care, but I think this is quite a euphemistic way of describing something that I would describe it as state enforced child removal. In any case, kind of forcible child protection interventions.
So you mentioned that child protection has been dominated by a rescue mindset. And critical social work scholars have spoken about a shift like a punitive shift in child protection, social work that’s taken place over the last 4 or 5 decades, so in the kind of neoliberal era, broadly speaking. It wasn’t my kind of aim or the scope of the research to work directly with social workers.
So I won’t try and kind of give any insight into what goes on inside child protection, social workers, there are other people who’ve written about this really, really fascinatingly, but I can say what the effects are of this punitive shift in social work on the people who are most affected by it, or among the most affected by it, and how those people try to live with a sense of judgment and a kind of risk of child removal in their day to day lives.
So it came up. I wasn’t expecting to do any of my field work about parenting or about child protection interventions, but it came up in a way that just seemed to resemble the way people spoke about their debt problems, that I couldn’t really ignore it. People told me about encounters that they’d had with social workers and the kinds of things that social workers had commented on.
For instance, one guy told me that a social worker had commented on crumbs on the worktop in the kitchen as being kind of a potential concern. Another woman that I’ve spoken to said that a social worker had come around to visit and that he had mentioned that there were clothes folded on the stairs as a potential safeguarding issue.
So this woman said, I’ve done this, I’ve been a parent for nine years. I do this every day. I wash the clothes during the day, I fold them up, and I put them on the bottom of the stairs, and I take them up when I take the kids to bed in the evening. I’ve never had any problem over it.
I mean, I think a lot of people do this without any problems. So really, the things that people picked up on, what residents picked up on was that there was a sense of social workers picking up on really trivial and actually very kind of commonplace household practices as being like some kind of concern for safeguarding children. And linked to that was a very strong perception among residents, really strong feeling, and I think a really well found a feeling, that social workers were intrusive or even invasive in the things that they were looking at or paying attention to.
So the same woman that had had a social worker say there were clothes folded up on the stairs, and that’s an issue the social worker had asked to have a look at the kids bedroom and said that was part of standard procedure. And she had said to me, but not to the social worker, what was he expecting to find there? Like what are you going to get in a kid’s bedroom? Like, it’s going to be messy most of the time. Like, is he worried about whether there’s a bed in there or not? So there was a just a feeling that they often crossed the line in terms of what was respectful and what was reasonable.
Residents also said things to me, like a lot of state funded services were really, really welcome and especially people spoke very gratefully about child and adolescent mental health services as being like a really vital source of support. People were very often wary of social workers and would say things like, no one really wants to have social workers involved in their life.
One man said to me that he’s worried that if he asks social services for more support, they’ll think he’s not coping and it will end up in them removing his children from him. So even at times where there was a sense that there might be support to be gained from social services, there was a very strong feeling of wariness attached to that.
I think it wasn’t initially always spelled out to me, but the more I spoke to people, the more it seemed to be that this was because of the prospect of forced child removal being part of the kind of what might potentially happen. It really didn’t happen very often, but I think that how devastating it would be for people to experience was really good reasons for people to be quite wary and quite kind of on guard about it.
And just one other point to make about this is that there are many, many kinds of professionals who are involved in children’s welfare, like health visitors, teachers, housing officers, potentially like there’s a whole plethora of different kinds of public and voluntary sector workers whom who can potentially trigger a referral to social services. And so that led to a kind of more diffuse wariness towards a lot of these different public and voluntary sector bodies, not just social services.
RK: You were saying earlier about changes to credit, that kind of opened floodgates in the 1980s. Another thing that happened in the 1980s was, the Right to buy scheme. Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced it in the 80s. And, while Thatcher’s government has been responsible for so many draconian changes in government, I always kind of saw the right for council house tenants to buy their homes as a good thing, as a positive.
But you show a very different angle of disappearing rent controls, easier evictions, skyrocketing rental prices. Could you explain the connection here please, between right to buy and then these effects.
RD: Yeah, sure. I think the key thing with the right to buy was that there was always a ban on councils being able to reinvest the proceeds of selling council houses. There was always a ban on being able to reinvest that revenue into building more social housing. So the aim with the right to buy policy was always to reduce the amount of social housing that was available, and on the left, most people view the right to buy negatively.
I think because of this, because it was a way of reducing the supply of social housing. And personally, and this is, I’m speaking personally here rather than kind of only through the research. But personally, I’ve had more mixed feelings about the right to buy because both my parents families benefited directly from the right to buy. So, the council houses that both my sets of grandparents lived in in Nottingham after they moved there are still in my extended family.
So that policy provided direct access to secure housing. And I think while seeing the like huge problems of the right to buy policy, I think it’s also important, like never to begrudge people for a desire for secure housing, especially when so much of the housing that’s available is extremely precarious. There are negatives too that I found in my research, and this is really kind of taking a step back from the right to buy on its own and looking at the right to buy policy alongside other reforms to housing that were introduced by the Thatcher government and were not changed subsequently.
So rent controls had been in place in Britain for, I think, the early 20th century, since the early 20th century and those were scrapped in the 1980s so landlords could now charge any level of rent that they thought someone might potentially be willing to pay. The Thatcher government also created a new kind of tenancy contract. Previously, if you were a rental tenant, you’d probably have what’s called an assured tenancy.
Those were, well, the Thatcher government created a new kind of tenancy contract called an assured shorthold tenancy contract. So if you’re a private renter today, you very probably have an assured shorthold tenancy. And the difference from what came before it was that with an assured shorthold tenancy, landlords could evict their tenants without any grounds where the tenant had kind of broken their agreement with the landlord.
So there’s no need for kind of rent arrears, there’s no need for any kind of behaviour that went against the agreement on the tenancy contract. So those two things, scrapping rent controls and making it easier for landlords to evict their tenants. These two reforms arguably were introduced to encourage landlords to rent out what was, in the 1980s, a growing number of vacant properties.
So there was also a kind of as much as the Thatcher government was shouting about kind of property owning democracy and trying to increase access to home ownership, they were also introducing reforms that were paving the way for a massive increase in the private rental sector. And we’ve seen that increase in the private rental sector, especially in the last 20 years or so.
It’s become much more of a problem as many people will be aware already, access to housing, access to home ownership has become much more difficult for so many more people. So many other people who have written about these reforms much more knowledgeably than I have. My contribution in this kind of picture is to show that these reforms to housing led to more and more people being private renters, where they were exposed to a risk of eviction as part of their day to day domestic life.
So it was part of their ordinary, what had become ordinary, even if a deeply regrettable part of their domestic life, to have some concern about being evicted, even if you kept up your side of the agreement. And so I look at what people who are living in Woldham, what the residents there did in order to make that situation bearable and to make it liveable, and I found that one of the things people did was to try to create a sense of a positive future in their domestic space, and by doing so, try to dispel those more bleak futures that they might also be imagining about eviction and ending up in worse housing.
That could be in a number of ways, so people might hold a hope of being able to get a mortgage one day, even when it really seemed like they were up against it in terms of their chances for accessing a mortgage, it was also I found in home entertainment practices, quite interestingly, people often used home entertainment technology as a way of creating a sense of modernity, a sense of progress, kind of technological progress within the space of their homes.
And I argue that this is one way of kind of displacing some of those fears of eviction by creating a sense of a positive future. So I’m particularly interested in kind of how people on a very local, even at the level of a household in the home, how people live with these very broad political and economic changes.
RK: According to Bernie, one of the debt advisors that you spoke with for your book, reasons for people getting into debt include: poor budgeting, irresponsible spending on cigarettes and alcohol, addiction, poor parenting, work shyness, and welfare dependency. That doesn’t sound like the fairest critique of people in debt. Why would someone who’s working in debt advice look at debtors in this way?
RD: So Bernie had this explanation, and Bernie is a kind of the debt adviser whose story I focus on most, I have a chapter in the book about debt advice. Bernie had very kind of specific views on why people got into debt and most of his views on why people had debt problems were stigmatizing one way or another in the sense that the way that Bernie spoke about debt kind of put the onus for debt problems happening on the shoulders of the people who were experiencing the debt problems.
Views among advisors, I really have to say, like vary very widely about the reasons for debt as well as kind of adviser’s political views more, more broadly. So even within the advice service where Bernie was working, there was a variety of- I asked the advisors, why do you think people get into debt? And there were a variety of answers on this.
So another alternative, like another explanation that one of the advisors gave me was that there’d been a kind of cultural shift over the generations where when he was younger, this guy was probably in his 40s. So when he was younger, people didn’t spend beyond their means. For instance, he bought everything second hand until he and his wife could afford to buy things new or have luxuries as he would see it.
Whereas people these days, according to this other advisor, spent beyond their means and there’s more of a consumer culture today where people just want the latest thing. This other advisor also said that people these days also lack the financial skills to be able to budget more prudently so that they’re not borrowing beyond their means or spending beyond their means.
And this advisor kind of seems a bit less… a bit fairer in some ways, maybe, than the way Bernie attributed debt problems to people spending their money on tobacco and alcohol and buying big TVs. But I think both of those advisors, in one way or another, are stigmatizing the people who are experiencing the debt problems still.
It’s like that’s where the problems are coming from. It’s the people with the debt problems. Other advisors that I’ve spoken to around the country. So I interviewed advisors at seven different advice services around the UK. And since the main part of the fieldwork, I’ve spoken to a number of advisors elsewhere, and the views really vary. So some debt advisors are quite conservative politically, others are more on the left.
So kind of social democratic, others more radical, so socialist or anti-capitalist, and the views for why debt problems happen often vary. Like within the advice service that I volunteered at, there wasn’t much of an interest in kind of more structural reasons why debt problems happen, such as kind of wages being lower relative to the cost of living or housing becoming more expensive.
And so on, or even a lack of available jobs. But advisors do really vary on this. I’ve found through my research that over time, the political views that are more widespread among advisors have varied, as the funding conditions for advice have varied and the working conditions for advice have varied. I’ve written about this in an article that’s not included in the book called Financialised Welfare.
So in the 1980s, in the early days of debt advice, many people got into debt advice to enact anti-capitalist or socialist politics. Whereas by the 2000s, there was a bit more of a feeling in the debt advice sector, at least among advise managers, maybe not the frontline workers that advice can actually benefit debtors and lenders at the same time.
So a kind of more, actually a bit of a more third way, a more new labour-esque way of thinking about helping business and helping working class people. I think advisors are in a very challenging position because they’re committed to supporting their clients, they’re committed to being non-judgmental, and they’re committed to economic justice, broadly speaking. And yet, the requirements of working in debt advice, because of the funders requirements, are often to try to encourage a kind of financial self-discipline in terms of slow and steady repayment of debts.
That doesn’t always reflects the fact that many people today have to borrow out of necessity, because wages aren’t always enough to live on. And I also found that as I was doing my research, there were austerity cutbacks to the funding of debt advice. And so the working conditions for debt advisors became much more difficult. And the pressures of the job increased they had to see much, a higher number of clients more quickly. And sometimes the advisers I worked with, Bernie is one example of this, saw more and more of their clients as difficult clients, in Bernie’s words, and often through the lens of stereotypes of the underclass, so-called or people being dependent on benefits and so on.
And these were stereotypes that the media and politicians were kind of pushing at the time during the 2010s. So this way of looking at debtors in a way that kind of put the blame on debtors at times was partly a problem of poor working conditions and low morale among advisors. And as a final point on this, I’m not saying that that’s a representative picture of the advice sector by any stretch.
Like I said, there’s a huge variety of views. And I do think that recent efforts to build collective strength among debt advisors, to build trade union membership among debt advisors can help to improve working conditions for debt advisors. So, Unite the union has formed a branch for debt advisers recently. There’s also a campaign called We Are Debt Advisors that tries to kind of form a collective voice for frontline debt advice workers.
And I think these measures can be very effective in addressing some of the effects of really, really challenging working conditions that advisers are often faced with.
RK: So considering everything that you experienced, both living with residents and working with the advisers, you said a bit about changes and I’d love to hear a bit more, if you wouldn’t mind, Please. What changes need to happen to break this unending, seemingly unending cycle of debt?
RD: It’s such a big question, and I think there’s often a temptation with debt to think that if the problem is clearly debt, people are struggling with their debts and the debts are causing them sleepless nights, even mental health problems, then mustn’t it be that the remedy for these problems is to kind of try and reform debt, so regulate debt in a different way and provide solutions to debt and some of these kinds of remedies that address debt directly could include things like subsidizing the cost of credit I mentioned earlier, so that lower income groups pay lower interest rather than higher interest. So basically make credit more affordable.
There have been some initiatives already by a group called Fair by Design to make credit more affordable. Also, restoring funding for debt advice could help a lot of people, as well as amplifying the voices of people who have been in debt themselves. So amplifying the voice of lived experience. The group Debt Justice UK have done amazing work doing this, also widening access to insolvency and debt cancellation could also improve things, there have actually been some improvements, with making debt relief orders more widely available recently.
So those are kind of changes that could address debt head on. But when people rely on borrowing, especially out of necessity, that’s also a symptom of much broader issues. And I think these broader issues might be addressed more effectively by trying to redistribute resources and also trying to reduce or even eliminate the coercive sanctions that are used when people are struggling to repay.
So when I’m talking about kind of redistribution and reducing the use of coercive measures to enforce repayment, I’m thinking about things like the taxation of wealth, also guaranteeing higher incomes, both in terms of wages. So having a meaningful living wage and also in terms of benefit levels. So the benefit levels are actually kind of, affordable for people to, to live on, which often they’re not also controlling the cost of rent and the cost of other essentials like energy bills, protecting tenants against eviction.
So reintroducing some of the protections that were previously there for tenants before the 1980s, and also the protections for tenants that exist in a lot of places in continental Europe at the moment. The government has been promised to, has been promising sorry, to end what are called no fault evictions for a long time, and we’re still waiting for that to happen. Hopefully it will happen soon.
And then another measure that that could be done is to abolish bailiffs. So there have been campaigns at times to abolish the use of bailiffs. The community union, Acorn is trying to ban bailiffs for the use, the use of bailiffs for collecting council tax arrears at the moment, I think that could be done much more widely.
But I also would like to say that I’m not convinced that reforming our policies and laws can stop all the problems that I observed. I think more radical or even revolutionary changes may also be needed. So why can’t we also talk about the abolition of private property? For instance, when we have conversations about what could be done. We should also think about bottom up changes and not just top down changes that are made by the people who are already in power.
And so really, one of the central focuses of my book is to look at people who are ignoring their debts and to try to think about this practice of ignoring their debts as a way that people in their everyday lives are refusing to pay debts that they think are not just or debts that they think are harming their health, either mentally or physically.
And the main argument that I try and make in the book is that instead of judging or blaming people who ignore their debts, we should try to acknowledge this as part of a struggle to change that cycle of debt that you mentioned. Part of a struggle against a very unequal and a very unjust system.
RK: Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the Transforming Society podcast today. It’s been wonderful discussing your book and your field work. In a moment, I’m gonna let everyone know where they can find your book. But first, I just wanted to know, is there any where we can find you online?
RD: Sure. Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you so much, Rich, for your time and for the really thought provoking questions like, it’s really a pleasure and a treat to be able to have this conversation with you today. Online, yeah, I have a university profile at Cardiff University. So if you search for my name and Cardiff University, you can find my employers profile page for me, which has got my publications on there.
I also have a Twitter or X account, which is @RyanDavey284 and I’m on BlueSky as well. If you look for Ryan Davey 284 it should bring up my profile. I’ve tried to make most of my publications available open access so that they’re not behind a paywall, and maybe we’ll get onto this in a second. But the book is also available open access. Really glad to be able to say that.
RK: Excellent, thank you, Ryan. ‘The Personal Life of Debt: Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain’ is published by Bristol University Press. And as Ryan said it’s also available open access, so anyone can go read it right now. You can find out more about the book by going to bristoluniversitypress.co.uk and also transformingsociety.co.uk.