Polluter pays?: Understanding austerity through debt advice in the UK

Davey, Ryan

doi:10.1111/1467-8322.12377

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In his study of debt advisers in the UK, Davey (2017: 10) shows that the bulk of their work with low-income clients consists of identifying all debts and payment requirements, details of which their clients were often unaware or had ignored. This was partly due to the obscure language of financial and legal contracts, but also because the confrontation with payment requirements is emotionally upsetting.…”

Section: Affective (Non-)knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction

Bovensiepen

Pelkmans

2020

Critique of Anthropology

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What are the politics of ignorance in an age of misinformation? How can the concept of ‘wilful blindness’ help us to understand the logics involved? We start the introduction to this special issue by arguing that the intrinsic instability of wilful blindness draws valuable attention to the graded nature of intentionality and perception, and the tensions between them. These features are an essential part of the workings of ignorance, as we illustrate with reference to the shifting intentions of drug couriers, the fleeting moments in which the humanity of victims is recognised in the midst of violent acts, and the affects that channel economic behaviour, such as in the subprime mortgage crisis. When approaching perception and intentionality as complexly entangled in institutionalised fields of power, ‘wilful blindness’ emerges as a powerful and critical diagnostic of the epistemic instabilities of our time.

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Section: Affective (Non-)knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction

Bovensiepen

Pelkmans

2020

Critique of Anthropology

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“…This crisis crystallised in the emergence of the PAH (García Lamarca 2017;Mangot 2013;Mir et al 2013;Parcerisa 2014;Sabaté 2019;Suárez 2017). Contrary to what has happened in other countries like the United Kingdom (Davey 2017), little attention has been paid to the role played by debt advice agencies in mortgage default cases. Similarly, the action of judges or judicial personnel has rarely been researched.…”

Section: Addressing the Repossession Crisis In Barcelonamentioning

confidence: 99%

Limiting Mortgagors’ Liability and Questioning the Obligation to Repay

Muriel

2021

Journal of Legal Anthropology

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This article addresses different approaches to the spate of home repossessions experienced in Spain after the burst of the housing bubble in 2008. It considers the diverging ways in which various involved actors – legislators setting regulatory frameworks, debt advisors from governmental and non-governmental agencies, judges ruling on repossession procedures, anti-repossession movements advocating debt refusal and the ‘self-defence’ of the right to housing – have reacted to the housing crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork developed in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the article considers that a vindicatory approach, one that incorporates moral ideas of justice, informed some of these diverging reactions over and against the orthodox stance that the obligation to repay is absolute. The vindicatory understanding of justice advocates favouring debtors by taking into account their new circumstances and repairing the social harm inflicted on them.

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“…Amid actual or anticipated reductions in public funding from general taxation, three distinct models of revenue-generation have emerged since the early 1990s. They include the 'fair share contributions' model, where each creditor pays the advice provider for each repayment they receive (around ten per cent); partnerships with creditors; 11 and a statutory levy on financial service providers, said to work on the principle 'polluter pays' (Davey 2017). Known as the Bank Levy, this replaced general taxation as the funding stream for free public debt advice in the UK upon its creation in 2012, when other advice services were receiving funding cuts.…”

Section: Funding From the Financial Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Financialised Welfare and Its Vulnerabilities: Advice, Consumer Credit, and Church-Based Charity in the UK

Davey¹

2020

Ethnos

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Debt advice, as a neoliberal variant of social welfare in the UK, highlights the introduction and repercussions of approaches to welfare that encourage, and/or rely on, financial speculation. Since the 1990s, senior managers in the debt advice sector have anticipated funding cuts by advocating cooperation with the financial industry, implying a financialised concept of social welfare that valorises the redistribution of opportunities to speculate, rather than that of wealth. Yet following cuts, 'front-line' debt advisers complain they are unable to provide the required level of care and compassion, leading to an increase in church-based, volunteer-run advice, aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable. Rather than some predetermined political modality, the ethical concepts of welfare that caught on, and the moral qualities consequently ascribed to its beneficiaries, emerged at the interface of managers' assessments of the viability of particular funding models with the political-economic conditions in which those models were implemented.

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Polluter pays?: Understanding austerity through debt advice in the UK

Cited by 9 publications

References 9 publications

Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction

Dynamics of wilful blindness: An introduction

Limiting Mortgagors’ Liability and Questioning the Obligation to Repay

Financialised Welfare and Its Vulnerabilities: Advice, Consumer Credit, and Church-Based Charity in the UK

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