9: “Advice on the Law But Not Legal Advice So Much”: Weaving Law and Life Into Debt Advice
Second unsupervised inteMy diary of participating in the Citizens Advice training programme is littered with these experiences. Notes on Debt Relief Order procedure are followed by my own worries about forgotten credit cards or the Council Tax Bill – debt in the abstract intertwining with debt as personal anxiety. We are used to thinking of debt as a question of morality (I am frequently reminded by friends that both Swedish and German hold the same word for ‘debt’ as for ‘guilt’), or of time: debt as the purchasing of today’s consumption with tomorrow’s labour. It is unusual to think of debt as a legal question. Yet it is through debt that many people will become enmeshed within the reaches of law, whether being forced to engage with the power of a contract or to question the nature of ownership. What defines different debts, as opposed to debt generally, are the legal framings that shape, among other things, how, when and by whom they can be enforced and collected.
I will explore here what debt advice tells us about how ‘law’ and ‘life’ are intertwined in the practice of advice. This intertwining, I argue, has important implications for the ongoing role of advice in the context of an assumption, presented in a Ministry of Justice paper that preceded the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO), that volunteer advisers merely provide the public with ‘practical’ information (MoJ, 2010). I will focus on the question raised by this assumption: is there a difference between the advice they give and formal ‘legal advice’, and does this difference matter?
From our interviews and diaries of the Citizens Advice training programme, trainees noted that, compared to the perils of negotiating the labyrinthine intricacies of the UK benefits system, debt advice appears reasonably straightforward.
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