Recently, my work has brought me into contact with a lot of activity around fuel poverty in the UK. Behind the facts and figures are people facing the prospect of being unable to afford to keep their homes warm, or choosing between ‘heating or eating’. As is so often the case, the most vulnerable are the most likely to suffer.
I’ve found this period deeply triggering for reasons I trace back to my adolescence.
As a teenager in South Africa, I regularly experienced our water and electricity being cut off because my parents were unable to pay their bills. I have no recollection of how many months of unpaid utilities they accrued before this happened (and it happened often). But cut off they were. And this was not my only experience of debt enforcement.
Imagine what it feels like not being able to shower before school, or having to turn a friend away because your electricity has once again been shut off by the supplier. Imagine trying to explain to your friends why you have suddenly moved house, without telling them your family has been evicted because you are too humiliated to admit it. The point is, debt enforcement deprived me of the experiences and securities that so many people take for granted.
Explaining these experiences to a reader is easy. Conveying the sense of fear and humiliation that accompanied being on the receiving end of corporate and government debt enforcement, even though I was not personally responsible for generating the debt, is very difficult. I would go so far as to say that one cannot fully appreciate the trauma of these experiences without experiencing it for themselves.
One of the most salient of these experiences was as a result of the debt my mother accrued through credit extended by Edgars, a large South African clothing retailer that was part of the Edcon group (which went into business rescue in 2020 and has since ceased trading). My mother rapidly accumulated thousands of rands in debt via a store credit card, which my parents simply could not afford to repay.
Neither of my parents ever received a formal diagnosis for mental health conditions. But looking back, I believe both suffered from depression, and possibly other comorbidities. Both had serious problems with alcohol. Whatever the precise diagnoses might have been, they were struggling, and they needed help. This is not surprising, as a relationship between debt and mental health problems is well documented. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, for example, reports that 18% of people with mental health problems experience problem debt versus 5% of people without mental health challenges. In a survey of about 5 500 people with experience of mental health problems, 72% of respondents said those problems had negatively impacted their financial wellbeing. And the converse is true too: 86% said their financial situation had worsened their mental health.
So, there is a clear link between problem debt and poor mental health, and yet, we exist in a society where the obligation to repay debt is still treated as inviolable. That it was easier for my mother to access credit than appropriate mental health care tells you a great deal about the priorities of the economy she was living in.
After months of non-payment and warnings, the debt was handed over to a collection agency. One of its tactics was to make automated telephone calls threatening all sorts of consequences if the account was not settled immediately. In an act of purposeful cruelty, these calls came at seven o’clock on Saturday mornings, many of which I answered myself.
Things came to a head just after I finished high school, when a Sheriff of the Court (a role broadly equivalent to a bailiff in England) arrived at our house with a court order to attach assets to cover the unpaid debt, as well as the costs of collecting it. By this stage, I had secured a simple office job. My intention was to save enough money to buy a plane ticket to the UK and escape my life in South Africa. Instead, I ended up paying down my mother’s debt.
I can write about all of this now, more than twenty years later, and the primary emotion I experience is rage. But at the time, I was overwhelmed by humiliation.
The narrative we are fed is that debt is something that bad, irresponsible people get themselves into because they cannot manage their lives properly, and I was subject to that narrative. I was humiliated by my parents, by our circumstances, and by the different forms of debt enforcement to which we were subjected. Looking back, I can recognise that what my parents needed was psychological and financial support. What they got were threatening letters and debt collectors.
It is impossible for me to know what appropriate support might have changed for my parents. But I find it difficult to see how threatening calls on Saturday mornings could have helped them address the profound cognitive and emotional problems underlying their debt.
And I was caught in the blast radius of these enforcement actions. And this is something I believe that analyses of debt so often fail to recognise. Debt enforcement reaches people who never directly borrowed, never consented to an act of borrowing, and have no real power to resolve the debt.
Children do not sign credit agreements. They do not negotiate repayment terms or interest rates. They cannot challenge collection agencies. But they can answer the telephone. They can go to school after having spent a couple of days without electricity or running water. They can learn to suppress normal adolescent relationships, because they are humiliated. Debt may belong to one person, but its consequences do not. And debt enforcement almost entirely fails to recognise this fact.
In England and Wales, household water supplies cannot be disconnected for non-payment. Whatever debt a household has accrued, losing access to water is not a permissible means of recovering it. But people in Britain are still subjected to debt enforcement practices that can bring fear, humiliation, and trauma into their homes. Debt Justice’s Ban the Bailiffs campaign calls for an end to the use of bailiffs to collect council tax debt. Thinking about families facing these visits brings back memories of experiences I wholeheartedly believe do not belong in a compassionate society.
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber explores how deeply debt is entangled with our ideas of morality and societal obligations. His work challenges us to question arrangements that we have come to treat as natural or inevitable. Why does the obligation to repay become so morally profound that the suffering inflicted in its name is treated as incidental? There is nothing sacrosanct about financial debt. The mere existence of an unpaid debt does not universally justify collection, and simply having access to legal enforcement does not equate to morality.
From personal experience, I can say that debt enforcement can be brutal, inhumane and traumatising. I know what it feels like to be dominated by an institution wielding the law under the guise of a moral imperative. I also know how easily shame falls on the people being subjected to enforcement. And when we zoom out, we can see this same moral logic operating on a far greater scale.
Ever since an Anthropology lecture in my early twenties, I’ve remembered learning about structural adjustment programmes in African countries facing debt crises. During the debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s, access to IMF and World Bank finance came with conditions that often included cuts to public expenditure like healthcare and education. These measures often resulted in increased mother and child mortality rates, domestic violence, and poorer educational outcomes.
More recently, a review published in 2017 examined thirteen studies of structural adjustment in developing countries. Eleven linked structural adjustment to worse child or maternal health outcomes. These findings raise a question we cannot ignore: why should the health of children or their mothers become part of the adjustment required to resolve debt?
The scale and mechanisms are different from what happened to my family. But an unjust and downright odious distribution of power remains consistent. People who had no part in taking on the debt still become subject to its consequences. Children in Mozambique or the DRC or Zambia do not negotiate sovereign loans. Yet their healthcare, education and future opportunities can become part of what is sacrificed in the response to a debt crisis.
We should be deeply troubled by an economic order in which financial claims can take precedence over people’s wellbeing. We should also question the power that creditors are permitted to exercise over the choices available to indebted countries. The right to repayment should never amount to an unrestricted claim on a population’s future. As a society, we need to reinvent our relationship with debt, and with one another.
In the short term, we should support initiatives like Ban the Bailiffs. We should demand accessible financial and psychological support before households collapse into crises. Lending practices that exploit vulnerability or disregard the ability to repay should be aggressively curtailed. Our welfare systems should protect people from needing to borrow simply to get through the month.
We should also support debt cancellation where debts have been unjustly incurred, or where repayment can only be achieved through unacceptable harms. And this is a principle that should be applied at any scale - from individual households to entire countries. The vulnerable should not be forced to bear the consequences of repayment at any cost.
More than twenty years later, I can see my parents’ circumstances with a compassion I could not manage as a teenager. They needed help. I needed a stable home, the freedom to invite friends over, and the chance to save for my own ambitions. Instead, my early life was organised around debt. I do not believe the humiliation I experienced made anyone more responsible, nor do I believe it made our society healthier, fairer or more humane.
The debt was treated as an obligation that had to be honoured. The damage done was simply a consequence to bear. For our collective wellbeing, we should reject the idea that enforcing a financial debt matters more than the lives of the people affected.
References
Hyprop Investments (2021). Integrated Annual Report 2021.
Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. Money and mental health: facts and statistics.
Murray, T. and Bond, N. (2023). Debts and Despair: How debt collection practices contribute to psychological harm.
Ofwat. Problems with your bill.
Debt Justice. Ban the Bailiffs.
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
World Bank. History: Economies in transition and structural adjustment.
Thomson, M., Kentikelenis, A. and Stubbs, T. (2017). Structural adjustment programmes adversely affect vulnerable populations: a systematic-narrative review of their effect on child and maternal health. Public Health Reviews, 38, article 13.
Photo by Jeffrey Clayton on Unsplash