“Get the door will you, Tom?”, a woman’s voice calls out, and an upstairs window is pushed open with the end of a crutch. “He’ll be with you in a minute, pet,” the voice calls down before the window closes, and I wait on a rickety wooden bench in the front yard. Tom, a tall, slender boy in his late teens, opens the front door and his mother hobbles downstairs behind him, her right leg in plaster up to the knee. With no room for introductions in the narrow hall, Tom leads the way through the kitchen and into the dining area.

“Sorry, we’re decorating, it’s a bit of a mess,” Tom’s mother says, and I think of all the other homes I’ve visited for our debt research, similarly suspended mid-refurb, and I wonder what it might mean – the abandonment of a dream? Hope of a fresh start? Life on hold?

“Kids, in here,” Tom’s mother calls, and children seem to spill out of the adjoining living room. “This is Tom, he’s 17, Mikey, 14, Leah, nine and Darrell, six, they’re mine, and these lot live next door, don’t yous? I’m just watching them for a bit. Oh and I’m Helen.” She pats each of the children on the head as she introduces them, and the younger ones laugh, lighting up the room with their toothless grins. “You can go there,” Helen nods towards the dining table, and Tom and I sit down as Helen and the children pile back into the living room, the theme tune to the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants almost drowning out the squabbles over who sits where.

We tread carefully at first, talking about how Tom spends his time, about his role as big brother, about how his mother broke her ankle, but it does not take long before we wander into financial territory and it becomes apparent that, while Tom does not know the finer-grained detail of his mother’s income, outgoings or debts, he knows about their money problems and debts in general – and that his mother owes thousands – and about the effects of this on him and the rest of the family.