Christians Against Poverty (CAP) and the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing (CPFW) are currently working in partnership on a project that is taking an in-depth look at the impact of community-led debt advice. This Rapid Evidence Review is the first output of this project.
Download the review here
Find out moreMain aims of the report
- to understand the overall benefit of debt advice and how it has been measured so far;
- to investigate the extent to which delivery channel was explicitly part of existing debt advice evaluations;
- to identify where the benefit of face-to-face delivery may implicitly be part of existing debt advice evaluations.
Key finding
- The role of delivery channel in shaping the outcomes of debt advice has not been examined extensively within existing research.
- However, within the evidence that does exist, the channel that people use to receive debt advice may be significant in terms of who accesses debt advice and the benefit they gain from it. This applies across both debt-related and quality of life benefits.
Points for further consideration
This review is the first output of an ongoing research project, and has been used to inform the ongoing design of the methodology and research that is taking place. There are three main points for further consideration channel differentials in debt outcomes:
- Evaluations of the impact of debt advice have not consistently considered the effect of subjective experiences of debt and debt advice. These factors may not be accounted for by preference, which could lead people to take an option which feels better but does not materially improve their situation. As such, these areas may lead to channel-related differentials in outcomes.
- Relatedly, while the positive effect of debt advice on mental health was noted across studies as a major quality of life benefit, it was also not consistently measured across the studies reviewed. This may be due to the very different profiles of debt advice recipients included as samples across studies, including tackling different channels of delivery. Nevertheless, we anticipate that mental health outcomes may differ across channels, particularly for those experiencing existing mental health challenges (Gazillo 2023; Holkar et al. 2018).
- The evidence also highlights that those who face existing challenges alongside debt challenges may need more in-depth support to achieve the same debt outcomes as others who are successful through other channels. We found that minoritised groups were indirectly highlighted as being more likely to experience health challenges due to health inequalities. Yet there was surprisingly little consideration of the experiences of minoritised groups in the debt advice process otherwise.
