My friend Pat Conaty, who has died aged 75, served for many years at the Birmingham Settlement, a charity that helps people in poverty and indebtedness. There, as development director, he pioneered a series of groundbreaking initiatives, including what became National Debtline, offering free support to people with debt problems in the UK.
In his work for Birmingham Settlement from the mid-1980s, Pat was seeing more and more people coming forward with debt problems, many of whom were victims of what he called “predatory lending”.
Witnessing first-hand the devastation wreaked by over-indebtedness, he led the collaboration with other debt advice agencies to establish in 1987 a phone line, together with a package of support material, to…