I just started my own e-petition, asking government to set in place a goal to achieve basic literacy and numeracy for all school leavers.

It’s a scandal that one in five of our teenagers can’t read or write properly or do basic sums – if you want to know more, please look at my earlier blog.

Here is what the e-petition says:

Universal basic literacy and numeracy for all

“It is estimated that one in five teenagers finish school without being able to read properly or do basic sums. These people can’t get jobs, can’t easily cope with everyday life and many wind up in our prisons. This petition is to ask government to set a target date of 2025 to achieve universal basic literacy and numeracy for children leaving secondary school, to report annually on the performance of every school in this regard and to provide both sanctions and appropriate funding for schools that fail to improve toward this goal.”

Please sign it now

This isn’t a spoiler for Martin Lewis’s highly successful petition to make financial education compulsory in schools (that’s something it would be really nice to have). But, I do believe that basic literacy and numeracy for all is something that would have far greater impact and which would give many more people the opportunity feel in control of their lives and to live happier.

In my view, no. Why?

First, most people with debt problems have substantial financial capability and understanding. They got into debt confident they could afford to repay it and then suffered a financial shock (redundancy, pregnancy, etc) and two or three years later realised that shock had made their commitments unredeemable.

Those who do suffer a lack of financial capability usually also suffer from a lack of basic numeracy and literacy skills. If we don’t tackle those first, then financial education won’t be useful.

TYhen, financial education is just too specific. Critical thinking skills would give all children the ability to understand a bum deal when they saw one.

Products and rights change, the ability to analyse them is always essential.

There is a great deal of tweeting, etc going on about an e-petition started by Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert ( @MartinSLewis). At first read I agreed with the basics of what he said in his petition (see below), but, on reflection, I think it’s actually very damaging to society that we should be pushing this right now and ignoring the real disaster in education – that one in five of our teenagers leave school unable to read and write properly or do basic sums.

Of course it would be ideal for every child to have basic financial skills. But it is utterly wrong to take time, money and focus out of the school curriculum whilst one in five of our teenagers leaves school without the skills to understand things they read or even do basic percentage calculations.That’s not a “nice to have” – its a basic responsibility that we should all give our children the tools they need to survive..

Ok, we might think that four out of five pupils would find financial education useful. But, that’s no reason, in my book, not to put all the focus, energy and resource we can into ensuring that basic literacy and numeracy is not just a right, but is actually a truth – something we guarantee to every child. Especially as (see below) fact-based education is becoming more and more useless to every child.

Lake of basic skills is not just a waste: It’s a criminal waste: we are tolerating a society where one in five of our young adults can’t get jobs and can’t function effectively with the basics of life. Thousands of these wind up in prison. This is one of the places our rioters come from.

Financial education is a (slightly) useful luxury: Petitioning for it whilst we can’t make a fifth of our children fit to do anything other than fail is a monstrous mistake. What’s more, it’s attracting so much attention it is getting the government off the hook about the need to give children the basic life skills that will change society for the better, for us all.

It may be too late for financial education to be useful anyway. Or in fact, any fact-based education that covers topics that are changeable. I believe what Martin wants, “to ensure every child in the country gets a basic understanding of personal finance & consumer rights before leaving school”, is not achievable – personal finance products and consumer rights are changing all the time. Personal finance is capable of generating all the press coverage it does and has as many “experts’ as it has,  precisely because it is complex, demanding and changing. If you’ve not seen the presentation “Shift happens” then I suggest you take five minutes and 19 seconds to do so: Basically, so much information is being produced in the world today, and so many things are changing, that most non-academic graduates will be finding that their degrees are out of date by the time they graduate. What hope for anyone who is taught about financial products and consumer rights in 2011 but doesn’t use that information until 2014, or later.

We need basic skills. If we are to add to the learning burden, then it’s the skills needed to assess information in any aspect of life and to make judgments based on information that our children need. With that they can handle anything – they’ll have the best chance of personal success and the ability to be discerning citizens too.

Here’s another thread on lovemoney where this is being debated.

For those puzzled about who I am – I tweet as @Andrew_F_Smith

As I said at the beginning, I don’t disagree with Mr Lewis’s call for financial eduction. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to do this until we can all read and write and add up. If you want to sign his petition – it’s here. And this is what he says:

Make financial education a compulsory part of the school curriculum

Responsible department: Department for Education

It’s a national disgrace that in the 20 years since introducing student loans, we’ve educated our youth into debt when they go to university, but never about debt. We’re a financially illiterate nation, with millions caught by misselling, overborrowing and being ripped off. Is it any surprise we’ve just had a debt imbued financial crisis. This must change. Companies spend billions on marketing and teaching their staff to sell – it’s time we got buyers’ training. The most cost effective way to start is to ensure every child in the country gets a basic understanding of personal finance & consumer rights before leaving school. This isn’t a large resource requirement. Some schools already do it, but the majority don’t and that needs to end. Unless it’s compulsory, head teachers can’t prioritise for it. 97% of people support this, yet no one will take up the baton. We have one of the world’s most complex consumer economies; it’s time our children were taught how to thrive and survive in it.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have been conducting a review of fee-charging debt management companies, to say they aren’t entirely happy is an understatement. A shame, because we do much well and work hard for our clients.

However, it looks like we will need to work harder to meet standards if we are going to get to the point where our industry is trusted by consumers and creditors.

The Debt Resolution Forum (a trade association for fee-charging debt management and IVA providers like ClearDebt – the company I am proud to work for) recently published it’s annual newsletter and included this article (reproduced here unedited) from Marie Whitley, the top dog in the OFT’s debt management team:

“OFT’s Debt Management Guidance Compliance Review – update

The OFT launched a review of compliance with its Debt Management Guidance (the Guidance) in November 2009 following an increase in enforcement action against businesses operating in the debt management sector, which has included formal interventions and warnings about misleading IVA mailings, ‘look alike’ debt advice websites, cold calling and other forms of bad practice. The overall aims of the review are to probe compliance levels across the industry and use the findings to prioritise OFT’s future enforcement strategy and prepare a revised version of the Guidance for consultation.

An analysis of the results is well underway and we will aim to publish a report in the summer.  Provisional findings indicating non-compliant advertising were conveyed to DRF members at last year’s industry conference.  Subsequent findings of wider and more systemic non-compliance drawn from the evidence obtained from our questionnaire survey, compliance audits and mystery shopping exercise have also been shared with DRF Board members.

A key message for the industry is that it has to do more to improve compliance levels which our review suggests have fallen well below minimum standards.  By now DRF members should have reviewed and amended their advertising to ensure compliance with the Guidance.  Remedial action should also have been taken to address the non-compliance issues highlighted by Trading Standards officers during recent audits.

The OFT is determined to protect vulnerable consumers from those that may look to take advantage of them by making misleading claims in their advertising or providing poor quality advice and information.  Whilst the OFT will continue to work co-operatively with the industry to drive up standards we will not hesitate to take targeted enforcement action against individual businesses in the coming months unless we see a step change improvement in their behaviour.”

I don’t think this could be much clearer. And, I do believe the best companies in the business can rise to the challenge.

I am not happy with our parliamentary candidates.

Few of them seem to think that personal debt is an issue worth paying a couple of moments of their attention.

What has surprised me is that the Liberal Democrats turned out to be the party that care least. Strange, given Vince Cable’s strong interest in consumer debt issues over the past few years.

My company did another survey (of people in debt) which shows (as I write – the poll is still live) that people in debt will (by a short head) mostly vote Lib Dem. Perhaps they should rethink?

I am going to tweet this at mine using tweetminster. Why don’t you?

An exhibition at the new Manchester branch of Whitewall Galleries swept me back to my childhood in so many ways his morning.

I’d heard that they were opening a brief exhibition of Rolf Harris’s work and I darn well had to see it before I dashed down south to see my daughters.I had to go, not because I was expecting much of the art (my expectations were a good deal lower than the reality) but because I had always wished he  could be my favourite uncle and I had to see what he could do when he had an easel, rather than an entire TV studio, to paint on. I’m glad I did.

Not for the alien Australian landscapes (which rushed me back to a book of photos I often took refuge in as a sickly, bedridden child) – I’ve never been to Oz and I would, at a shot, to experience red and orange tinder-dry grasslands, blue leaved gum trees and all the shapes and colours that English landscapes lack, Nor for the cool greens and dappled sunlight of foliage dripping over an English stream with boys (who could have been my mate Stuart and me) fishing for sticklebacks – I wonder if those colours would look alien too, to an untravelled Aussie?

No. It was “Dad”. On one wall hung a small black ink drawing on buff paper of a man in his prime, relaxed and pipe-smoking, brylcreemed hair and an air of calm self-confidence about the future. A man one could look up to. A man who might be your mate as well as your mentor.

Diagonally opposite and even tinier (and in navy blue Quink) hung “My old man”. Patently the same bloke, But much older, sunk into himself, A man with little future left and a man who needed the artist’s care and support, having little left to offer to others.

I wish I’d had the money for both (I couldn’t stretch to either – but it would have had to be the pair). The artist’s journey between the two drawings was extraordinary. Seeing them singly, you’d assume they were simple, expressive portraits. Together they seemed to be about the artist more than the subject and about the journey they had made.

Perhaps it’s just me. Those two drawings summed up in an instant my life with my father. They turned a moments’s idle curiosity into a morning of extraordinary memories.

Thank you Mr Harris.

For some years now Its seemed to me (because I’m in the debt business) that the Liberal Democrats have taken the issue of personal debt more seriously than the other two major parties.

My company is running a poll on its website, with most of the respondents coming from our community of people with debt problems. It’s early days – but the LibDems are leading the pack with (at the moment), the Tories at their heels and Labour a shabby third.

It’s early days – but if it stays like this, I think the credit (or blame) can be placed firmly at the feet of Vince Cable – the LibDem’s candidate for chancellor (and noted ballroom dancer) and shows the value of diligence and consistency in politics.

I reckon its possible that people with debt problems have, over the long haul, noticed who takes them most seriously, and decided to honour that party with their vote, thanks to Mr Cable.

And this could make a big difference – more than one in ten of the UK’s voters is struggling with personal debt. That’s a big lobby.

(Well, not much anyway).

The government today announced a new scheme to help people with debt problems that has been cooked up by the British Bankers Association (BBA), The Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) and Citizens’ Advice Bureau (sorry just Citizen’s Advice these days – CitA to their many friends).

This has sort of been presented as a government initiative (LOTs of ministerial comment in the press release) and I think it represents a kind of micro-electioneering. If so, the government have got it wrong, big-time, on a number of counts:

• First, this solution will help a tiny number of people – between a quarter and a half of one per cent of the people who ask for debt help every year.
• Secondly, the nature of the help offered (temporary help for people with short term problems) is not the kind of help most people in debt need – their problem is almost always long term and will take years, not months to sort out.

If my theory is correct, that a minister somewhere thought “there’s a few votes in this – might as well have them”, then i think they have got things terribly wrong. It’s not a few votes. It’s probably the votes of 3-5 million people at stake here. Most of whom are aware of their debt situation every waking moment and will know they’ve been offered nothing really new – or helpful.

All a damn shame really. What the debt help system in the Uk really lacks is a procedure for people who can repay most or all of what they owe – just not quite as quickly as the lenders breathing down their necks would want. I thought, with the proposed Regulated Debt Management Plan, we were about to get it. Tragic that the government wimped out.

I was gobsmacked, when I googled “Cartel Client Review” to discover more about their current run-in with the Ministry of Justice, to find a pay per click (PPC) advert from the BBC linking to a December article on their news site about this company.

I wasn’t sure if I was seeing an illusion or having a quietly histrionic moment.

The BBC? Paying for advertising on Google?

I tried again and it seemed to have gone. Fortunately I had taken a screenshot.

So, chaps – any ideas? Was it:

• An inexplicable abberation
• Crusading by the BBC, trying to warn potential Cartel Client Review Customers of the BBC’s concerns?
• Something else entirely?

Here’s what I saw:

Here is the story it linked to – this was published on December 4. Has the ad. been running that long?

I saw this by Sophie Ridge of the News of the World, on their politics blog.

I thought it only told half the story – so I wrote a reply  to say that pay day loans  seemed to resemble that vile invertebrate – the necessary weevil – and that they would do so until the major banks decided to do some low margin, but socially responsible, lending.

I’ve no brief for the pay-day loan vultures, but I believe we should think hard before tarring the entire sector with the same brush. And the minister (Kevin Brennan) knows this too: I was at a meeting he hosted last month where he and the charitable sector were reminded that the people who take this kind of credit just can’t get it anywhere else.

The poor funts (financial untouchables – a word I helped coin) just can’t get credit elsewhere. The burgeoning Credit Union sector has told government they would need to charge as much as the high interest credit providers (I am thinking more of people like Provident here) simply because of the risk of non-repayment from customers in this sector. The guy at the meeting representing the mainstream banks (through the British Bankers Association) admitted his members “did not have the expertise” to lend in that sector.

So, whilst huge amounts of credit are miss-sold in this marketplace, where does a person go when the washing machine finally becomes irreparable, when two new tyres are needed for the van to pass its MoT or a cot, car seat and buggy are needed for a new arrival?

Part of the problem is in the nature of the credit and the character of the consumer. If a payday loan is used as intended (and repaid in a month or two), then the interest paid (whilst high by any interpretation) is no worse than saying to a mate “lend us a tenner till the end of the month and I’ll buy you a pint”. And if the borrower does repay quickly (probably by making real sacrifices in other areas of living), then all is not unreasonable. However, the temptation is to roll the credit onwards and upwards and, even if you don’t add another penny to what you owe – but just repay the interest, the amounts soar and become ludicrously unaffordable.

For me, there is a solution, something I’ve been bleating on about for years – but which is now fashionable. Force the mainstream banks to offer products in this market. They can afford to absorb the risk. And, as we are now, in many cases, their majority shareholder, we can afford to say that they should represent their shareholders’ interests and lend to them. All of them.

Even the funts.