Working together to meet the demand for debt advice

A partnership approach is what will ultimately help us make inroads into the nation’s debt problems. How do we work with our partners in practice?By Vikki Brownridge, Director of Charity DevelopmentPhil Andrew, StepChange CEO speaking at Stepping Forward: TogetherWe’re enormously grateful for the funding that many partners provide which supports and underpins our ability to operate, and in turn helps hundreds of thousands of people to deal with their problem debt.One of the things we do is to make sure that our creditor and funding partners are involved in our development, and last week we held an event in Leeds to talk about our strategic direction, kick-off a 3 month consultation with them and to discuss some of our current and forthcoming ways of working projects.This reflects the collaborative approach we want to adopt, both with our partners and the wider sector, but also the need to recognise the pressing underlying scale of demand for debt advice. Addressing the market demand vs supply issue cannot be done in isolation, it will require a significant collective effort. These means we must all step up, together.Stepping Forward: TogetherThe event, ‘Stepping forward together: Gearing up for growth’, marks the start of a three-month consultation period with our partners to work together to help even more people struggling with problem debt.Our CEO Phil Andrew kicked off the day with an update on our four-year strategy, an overview of the funding issues facing the sector, and why we needed to transform the way we work, to maximise effectiveness and to add value to our clients and our funders.“ As a full service debt advice charity, giving people financial advice and getting them through debt advice where appropriate, we helped more people than ever before in 2018 — helping over 650,000 people, and completing over 306,000 debt advice sessions. It is deeply disturbing that we’re servicing such a high percentage of the UK population.”Caroline Siarkiewicz, Acting Chief Executive of the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) led the next session, talking us through their vision, strategic goals and insights into the current debt advice landscape.Our transformational journeyAndrew Burgess, Head of Client Journey talking us through transformationAndrew Burgess, our Head of Client Journey, talked us through the process we’ve been on to transform our ways of working and development of our new debt advice and customer management system. As he explained:“Growth comes at a cost… Our decision to take a strategic review of change was not about a system upgrade, or even a process change — it was a change to our basic ways of working. We were clear from the outset that we wanted to put users at the heart of this change. That means change to the advice system, how we interact with clients, the way our teams are structured, and the types of work we do, as well as how we measure success.”Kicking off the partner consultationThe afternoon session featured collaborative working groups.During the working groups there was plenty of lively discussion, with representatives from around the charity hosting the groups discussing questions like:How can creditors refer people beginning to experience financial difficulty but before they’re in problem debt?What initiatives could we work on together to underpin responsible credit use?How can we work together on persistent credit card debt to get customers to take action?What kinds of technology might usefully help us to best deliver debt advice to vulnerable clients?A huge thank you to the representatives of all our partner organisations who attended the event and engaged so enthusiastically in the discussion groups. Your support and suggestions are incredibly valuable to us and will help us continue to work towards reducing the harm of problem debt, deliver high-quality advice and early intervention services to all people who need them.In November we’ll be hosting a follow-up event in central London where we’ll share our consultation findings and reflect on what they mean for the charity.In the meantime, we want to hear views from all of our partners. You can have your say and take part in the consultation by emailing your comments or suggestions to our consultation inbox.Vikki Brownridge is Director of Charity Development at StepChange Debt Charity.