Published on:
31 August 2022
The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) is now calling for evidence on debt advice clients with deficit budgets. The purpose of this call for evidence is to understand what help can, or could, be offered where a client presents with a deficit budget, as well as what MaPS can do to enable this help to be given.
Debt advice clients with deficit budgets have been increasingly discussed throughout the sector in recent years. The challenges facing organisations when trying to assist these clients were much considered by the Debt Challenge Group set up in response to the UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing.
Where lasting positive outcomes are not obtained for clients, there can be an impact on:
These impacts mean it is critical for us, with the debt advice sector, to review whether there are ways that clients in a deficit budget could be supported to attain better, longer-lasting outcomes. This call for evidence is the first step in this review.
To fulfil our ambition, our specific objectives for this review are as follows:
We recognise this is a large call for evidence and may take considerable time to respond to. We have carefully considered this and believe this topic’s importance justifies a call for evidence on this scale.
So that as many stakeholders as possible can contribute, we are happy to engage in a number of different ways. Depending on demand, we will set up engagement sessions for stakeholders to feed into, and we are also happy to have telephone calls with individual stakeholders as an alternative or supplementary to written responses.
We welcome written responses, in any format, from all interested parties.
In your response, please state:
Please send your response to: [email protected]Opens in a new window by midday on 1st December 2022.
You can also get in touch via this email address if you have questions, or would like to express your interest in engaging in another way, e.g. engagement session, phone call, by post.
We would like to thank all stakeholders in advance for their engagement. Your contributions are valued, and we are very grateful for the time, effort and energy it takes to input to calls for evidence of this type.