Learn more about the research here
Christians Against Poverty (CAP) and the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing (CPFW) are currently collaborating on a project that is taking an in-depth look at the impact of community-led debt advice. Hayley James (Senior Research Fellow, CPFW) and I have been working together to understand the impact of face to face debt advice, and the extent to which this delivery channel could offer specific benefits to certain groups of people in need of debt advice.
The aim of this collaborative project is to work out which groups are most in need for face-to-face debt advice and estimate the scale of impact that this provides.
As part of this project, Hayley and I attended a Postgraduate Symposium in May 2026, that was centred around Everyday Justice, Welfare and the State. We were able to share the initial stages of our work with other early career researchers, who are interested in the work being done in and by local communities to improve the lives and wellbeing of people living there.
In June 2026, we were able to publish our first written output of this project. It is a Rapid Evidence Review, which looked at the existing research in the sector that looked at :
- 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.
The conclusion of the evidence review is that the channel of debt advice delivery hasn’t been extensively researched. 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.
This review is being used to inform the ongoing design of the methodology and research that is taking place. This project is running until the summer of 2027 and we are looking forward to being able to share more about what we find in the next year.
