This book contains the revised and updated versions of papers given at a conference held at Newcastle University in September 1983. The reviewer must at once declare an interest, in that he himself attended the conference and still regards it as one of the most successful and inspiring of such gatherings at which he has personally been present. That said, the question to be asked is whether the various contributions, re-read in printed form, are a worthwhile contribution to socio-legal literature. The answer must be an emphatic “yes”. Our understanding of the important problems of debt and debt recovery is presently very incomplete, based upon an inadequate supply of reliable data and first-hand information. The papers collected here at least serve to show where a start has been made in the task of gathering and interpreting the requisite information, and are also instructive in demonstrating many of the pitfalls which await those who would embark upon further work in this area.

Ramsay’s introductory essay sets the matter in context in a clear and challenging manner. Despite the fact that the forcible collection of unpaid debts is the backbone of a dynamic commercial society, there had until recent times been a remarkable lack of interest in the U.K. in the theoretical and practical issues concerning the operation of the legal regulation of credit breakdown. Major difficulties result from the fact that rules of law which have been largely conceived in relation to a middle-class clientele are regularly applied to persons of modest means, who are quite often heavily dependent upon the welfare state for their subsistence. The results of the earliest empirical studies of the causes of debt default are already indicating the fallacies of stereotyping upon which many established policies and procedures are based. These problems are immediately revealed in the two, linked papers by Parker, on Unemployment, Low Income and Debt, and by Hutton, on Low Income Families and Fuel Debt. The correlation between unemployment, or extremely low waged earnings, and debt problems of various kinds, including rent, fuel and hire purchase arrears, is in itself a matter of no great surprise. But the causal factors and the precise effects linked to specific factors need to be better understood if we are to avoid crude oversimplifications in our conception of the nature of the problems with which any existing or proposed procedures are to deal.

Part III of the collection contains papers surveying the formal and informal processes of debt recovery and contains an account of the preliminary results of the Queen Mary College survey of the recovery of judgment debts in the County Court. This highly important research has shed much light upon such questions as the effectiveness of the various enforcement procedures and their impact upon the debtor and the debtor’s family. In most instances, it is the creditor who selects the method of enforcement, having regard inevitably to his personal convenience and interests and also to the general matter of the debtor’s known circumstances. The debtor’s best interests are scarcely likely to be taken into account. Nor is there any mechanism for correlating orders and procedures used in different courts against the same debtor, or even against the same debtor in the same court. The personal predicament of the multiple debtor is thus ignored until the stage where matters have reached crisis point. The predicament of the defendant debtor in the County Court is further explored in depth by Cain in her paper. On the basis of her own empirical research, allied to