I lived on a poverty-stricken housing estate as an anthropologist – this is what I learned about debt

“Is Mr Hackett there?” “Who is it?” “CRS [a debt collection agency].” “No, he’s not in.” Bam.’

Pressing an imaginary button on the handset, Jason mimes hanging up the phone. He owes CRS £80. But with no money spare, the dad-of-three has “no choice” but to lie to bailiffs.

Welcome to Woldham. A pseudonym for a housing estate on the edge of a southern English town, it’s the setting for The Personal Life of Debt – a new ethnography by anthropologist Ryan Davey.

Over seven years, Davey spent 18 months living in the community, where debt is an omnipresent feature of everyday life. The Cardiff University academic embedded himself in the lives of residents like Jason and his partner Becky, trying to understand the emotional ramifications of constant repayment demands. You can download the resultant account here, in e-book form.

Read more:

• ‘Broken’ council tax system means millions of Brits face visit from bailiffs – but that’s set to change
• One in 10 Brits have no cash savings to fall back on – government action is vital
• I carried the weight of my £60,000 debt alone. Then one conversation changed everything

“I can be a bit shy getting to know people,” Davey tells the Big Issue. “But after I moved in, a few of the residents kind of took me under their wing, and they taught me a lot. They introduced me to their neighbours and their friends, their family members, and it kind of just snowballed.”

Debt is a growing problem in the UK. According to the Money and Pensions Service, 25% of Brits – around 11.5 million people – have less than £100 in savings. One in six has nothing at all. That financial fragility drives people to extremes: in the last three years, more than three million people in Great Britain have borrowed from illegal moneylenders.

In Woldham, many of the residents Davey met were drowning in debt. Most adopted the same risky tactics: hide, deny, reject the call, shut the door.

“In the media that kind of response – hanging up or putting the debt letters away – might be portrayed as irresponsible,” Davey explains.

“We still tend to blame people for being in debt, viewing it as an individual responsibility. But it is time to question the general moral idea that if you have a debt, you morally ought to repay it no matter what.”

Davey is “definitely not” encouraging people to simply ignore their debts, which can have serious legal ramifications. But he found that ignoring debts is often “the only option” people feel they have.

“’I’m not saying, ‘You know what, if you’ve got debts, don’t worry about it. Just ignore it.’ What I’m saying is that many, many people are doing this every day,” he says. “Many people are ignoring their debts every day, and they tend to be labelled as irresponsible or lacking skills, and this stigmatises them for trying to make ends meet in the shockingly unequal world that we live in.”

It’s very costly to be poor. The poverty premium sees the average low-income household pay out an extra £490 per year for essential goods and services. For some people that cost can be as high as £1,190 annually, anti-poverty charity Turn2Us estimate.

In this hostile, expensive climate, the residents of Woldham often feel that denial is the only tactic open to them.

“It was making me ill, mate,” Jason tells the anthropologist, explaining why he ignores debt letters. “So I couldn’t keep on like that. I just left ’em and got on with things.”

“You go into denial. It’s so much that your brain just switches,” Liz, a mental health nurse, explains. “I just kept putting the pieces of paper into a box and hoping it’d go away cos it’s just so stressful. You’re not sleeping at night. You’re not functioning properly anyway. So you haven’t got capacity to take it on board.”

Frank, a “50-something divorcee”, instructs Davey to never knock on his front door.

“I don’t answer it,” he said. “If you want to come in, knock on the [living room] window. That way I know you’re someone I know.”

One women, a civil servant, told Davey she kept her phone on answerphone: “Even when my family rang, I wouldn’t answer the phone until I knew who it was. I just used to keep the door locked. I literally used to barricade myself in.”

Davey coins a term for this condition: ‘expropriability’ – the economic, legal, emotional and existential vulnerability that haunts the lives of the indebted.

“It’s just on your mind seven days a week,” says Steve, a retired labourer who collects Elvis Presley memorabilia. “Once in a while, it gets you at night. You can’t sleep. You’re just thinking, when are they gonna phone up? Or, what’s going to happen?”

The anthropologist calls the coping mechanism defensive optimism – the practice of hoping enforcement doesn’t arrive today, and doing what you can to protect your peace in the meantime.

“The idea that people ‘should take ownership of their debt’,” Davey writes, “presumes a world where people have the luxury of control. In Woldham, survival means letting go of the illusion of control.”

But hiding isn’t harmless. Avoidance can come at a real cost.

“You don’t want to leave your house, cos you’re scared,” Jackie, a single mother living in social housing on the estate, says. She’s describing a bailiff visit. “You’re an emotional wreck waiting for it. As soon as the bailiff had gone, I sat here and I cried my eyes out.”

In Davey’s account, the state is not some distant bureaucratic structure – it’s an enforcer. Through bailiff powers, benefit sanctions, and even social services, the state embeds itself in people’s homes not as a source of support, but as a threat. Councils are “significantly harming” the health of vulnerable residents by sending council tax debt collectors after them, StepChange Debt Charity warned last year.

Davey doesn’t suggest that ignoring debt is a long-term answer. But he does push back on the dominant narrative – that debt is always the result of poor choices, and that repayment is simply a matter of budgeting well.

The result is a portrait of indebted people struggling not to collapse under the weight of a system that punishes poverty.

“To work out how much you owe each person – you just can’t,” Liz tells Davey. “It just seems insurmountable. You go into denial.”

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