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Financial difficulties faced by utility customers due to Covid may not be fully felt for several years, a senior policy officer at Citizens Advice has warned.
During an industry roundtable hosted by Auriga Services, participants from across the industry discussed financial hardship and specifically how customers have been affected by Covid-19.
Part of the discussion centred around when the post-pandemic wall of debt is expected to hit the sector.
Matt Vaughan Wilson, senior creditor liaison policy officer for the consumer charity, said he believed the difficulties caused by Covid may take some time to feed through.
Vaughan Wilson, who is also vice chair of the Essential Services Access Network, said: “I’m starting to become concerned that it may take quite a long time for the financial difficulties to feed through to the point where people are seeking advice and seeking support from essential service providers.
“We know that it very often takes people one to two years or more from the point where they start experiencing difficulty to the point where they actually pick up the phone or walk into an advice agency or do whatever they need to do to seek advice.”
Since the pandemic first began to take shape in the early months of last year, industry experts have expressed alarm that the worst financial impacts are yet to come.
Despite the fear felt by many, some industry experts have recently begun to express cautious optimism that the sector’s worst fears have not been released thanks to measures put in place to protect consumers.
Participants at the roundtable discussed other issues facing customers, with one organisation claiming that council tax was the single biggest area of non-payment by consumers. This was highlighted as being unusual as historically customers stop paying their water bills first when in difficulty.
Additionally, attendees discussed the merits of sharing data among different organisations by using means such as a shared priority services register detailing with the needs of the most vulnerable.
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