"No-one should wake up on Christmas morning in despair."
(A quote from a recent CAP donation campaign)
At The Crossway we have two teams who are trying to make sure this is true in our community: the Debt Support team and the Benefits Advice team.
If you have lived a relatively debt free life (except for mortgages & student loans) you may think debt problems are largely due to overspending on credit cards, loans, store cards & catalogues. This would have been true 10 years ago. Now the majority of these people have debts which can leave them homeless, fined by courts or even imprisoned. These include Council Tax and Rent, Utilities and Mortgages.
Citizens Advice estimates that 2.2 million households are behind on their Council Tax. It is the most common debt problem that they are asked to help with and they had 86,000 clients with this debt last year.
With Council Tax if a person misses just one of their monthly payments then they are required to pay the whole year’s tax up front within 14 days of receiving the demand. People may have no savings and not realise the consequences: this can quickly escalate.
Many, if not most, of the clients at The Crossway have Council Tax and Rent arrears and most do not ask for help before court fees and enforcement fees have been added.
How can you help?
1. Pray for the work of the debt team
(Tuesday & Thursday morning and Tuesday evening) and benefits team (Tuesday morning)
2. Consider volunteering for the debt team.
The current need is for more debt advice assistants (who support the 6 trained debt advisers). We sometimes cannot offer appointments, for safeguarding reasons, if we do not have a debt advice assistant available. https://youtu.be/wrR5rQSTtLQ - debt advisor stories. Email debtadvice@thecrossway.org.uk
3. Support Community Money Advice (CMA). They need financial support so that they can, in turn, support the work of the individual debt teams nationwide. https://youtu.be/BJSr4phFk2Y - CMA, helping people break free from debt.
4. Consider supporting the Citizens Advice campaign to ask parliament (the government after the general election) to reform the Council Tax Regulations (1992)
The Crossway Debt Support Team is part of the Community Money Advice network. It is resourced entirely from volunteers from St John's and is part of St John’s vision and ministry. Community Money Advice provide, for an annual fee, the computer programme to run debt support as well as training courses and telephone and email support for our work with clients.
The Benefits Team provides advice on benefits and helps people fill in claim forms. They are from a charity: Disability Resource Centre and St John's pays for the service / sessions provided by them.
Bill Fuggle
The Crossway Debt Support Team