“Let’s talk about the debt then….”, Faye shouts from the kitchen while she is boiling the kettle. Smiles are exchanged awkwardly with husband Dave, 15-year-old Sally and eight-year-old Archie while Faye bustles in with tea for us all and a packet of Tesco’s-value chocolate biscuits. A pint-sized bundle of nervous energy, she vaults up onto the sofa, tucks her feet in underneath her and fixes me with a penetrating but friendly stare.

Faye has been in debt for most of her adult life. She took out her first loan at the age of 20 to pay for a “holiday with the girls”, and while she was in the bank setting up the loan agreement, she found herself being talked into a credit card too. Marrying her first husband, Phil, a couple of years later, she has worked ever since, most recently as a kitchen assistant in a care home. But even with both Faye and Phil in full-time jobs – albeit low-wage ones that place them firmly in the ‘low-income’ bracket – they found themselves making regular use of catalogues, store cards and credit cards to pay for the things that they could not quite afford otherwise: a television, a stereo and some smart clothes for work. Over time the debts mounted up. The first loan they took out together was a consolidation loan to pay off the cards. Phil, who was an IT salesman, would sometimes receive a bonus around Christmas time, which would help to chip away at the total amount that they owed. Nevertheless, they never seemed to be able to wipe the slate completely clean.

When they divorced a few years later, Faye took out a bank loan to buy Phil out of the flat they had bought together, so that she and Sally, who was five years old at the time, could continue living there, with some extra to help with day-to-day costs. Within a matter of months, the loan was used up, so new lines of credit were needed, and even after selling the flat, Faye and Dave started their new life together saddled with debt. Faye describes a snowballing effect in which they found themselves taking out increasingly larger loans to cover the growing costs of servicing older debts.