Last week, we at the Money Advice Service published a report setting out a new perspective on the value of debt advice.
‘The Economic Impact of Debt Advice’ provides robust evidence that in financial terms debt advice benefits the UK economy by up to £960million a year.
And we used extremely conservative assumptions – relying on data from only four of twelve areas where there is plausible impact. This means our level of confidence in these figure is high and it is extremely likely that there are even greater financial, let alone personal, benefits being realised.
We estimate (generously rather than conservatively in this case!) that between £150m and £200m is invested annually in debt advice so our view is that the benefits we’ve identified represent a genuinely impressive return on investment.
The context for this, of course, is that only one in five over-indebted people are seeking advice – our analysis suggests that were we to increase this number then the level of benefit we would expect would rise in proportion.