UK Government incomeptent managment of debt help

April 7th, 2010

In yet another example of the stunning incompetence of this, hopefully doomed, government, the management of its strategy for helping people in debt has been labelled a “complete failure” by an influential Parliamentary committee.

The Public Accounts Committee has said that 51 different projects initiated since 2004 have been poorly led, uncoordinated and ineffective.

The report also pointed out that 11% of adults are struggling with debt and the population’s total personal debt has almost reached £1.5 trillion.

“In 2004, the government launched a strategy aimed at improving the support to, and reducing the number of, people who struggle with unmanageable debt.”

“No one is in charge of the strategy; groups intended to oversee it have not met, and there has been no reporting on its progress since 2007.”

“The strategy has not been evaluated to assess whether the policy goals have been achieved and the department does not know how effective the interventions making it up have been.”

However, the committee praised one initiative launched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to give face-to-face debt advice. This was described in the report as a “gleam of light”.

The £130m project is funded primarily from the Treasury’s Financial Inclusion Fund, and delivered in local areas by the Citizens Advice Bureau and other independent organisations.

“The department has achieved greater success in managing this particular project, which is delivering more debt advice than planned at a lower cost per person than budgeted.”

However, the report also said that even this project is failing to help all those it is aimed at, and more people could be helped if the Department for Business had a better grasp of the best ways to give advice.

As always, the Government response to this criticism points to the huge amount of money spent in the area of debt management advice and support and yet totally fails to address the issues of efficiency or value for money.

That in this time of frugality and belt-tightening the Labour Government still cannot understand that simply throwing money at a problem does not guarantee a solution is one of the surest signs that they are no longer fit to lead this country and that it is indeed time for a change.

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