Beyond Volumes: Setting Safe Workloads and Salary Floors in MaPS Commissioning
As the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) prepares to finalise its community-based debt advice commissioning programme for the 2028–2033 period, the sector stands at a crossroads. While these services provide a vital lifeline for many of the most financially vulnerable, a growing body of evidence suggests that the professionals delivering this support are reaching a breaking point. Recent research[1] from the Institute of Money Advisers (IMA) highlights a persistent crisis of wellbeing, driven by stagnant pay, case complexity, and a commissioning framework that has overlooked the human cost of the service.
The Human Cost
The wellbeing of debt advisers is a fundamental risk to the sustainability of the sector. The IMA’s recent report reveals that 41% of advisers report feeling stressed or anxious "often," with a staggering 84% experiencing these feelings at least "sometimes".
For many advisers, the pressure cannot be contained within their normal working hours. One in four advisers (25%) reports that their work "often" has a negative impact on their personal relationships, mood, and private activities. Anecdotal evidence suggests a workforce struggling to disconnect, with advisers frequently working evenings and weekends just to keep pace with their caseloads. This "always-on" culture has led to a poignant sense of isolation, with one professional stating, "I don't feel present in my personal relationships".
The physical and mental health consequences are tangible. In 2025, 11% of advisers reported needing time off "often" due to work-related health issues, including stress-induced breakdowns attributed to managing high volumes of complex cases.
Why the Work is Getting Harder
In 2025, advisers reported that 89% of their clients presented with mental health issues, 88% were struggling with deficit budgets (where income does not cover essential expenditure), and 41% had learning disabilities.
The level of case complexity requires significantly more time and emotional labour than current funding models allow. The average duration of a first appointment has risen to 81 minutes, and the administrative burden of writing case notes now averages 110 minutes per case. Despite a decrease in the average number of open cases to 27, advisers still report working an average of three hours of unpaid overtime every week to meet the needs of their clients.
When workloads become unmanageable, it is the clients who suffer most. Over 70% of advisers believe that workload pressures negatively impact their ability to fully support vulnerable clients, leading to longer resolution times and a higher risk of recording errors. High demand also means that clients are often forced to wait for initial appointments, during which time their financial and mental health situations can deteriorate significantly.[2]
Pay, Progression, and the Retention Crisis
Despite the extensive skill set required to be an effective community-based debt adviser, levels of pay are low. In 2025, 51% of advisers expressed dissatisfaction with pay, compared to just 29% who were satisfied. With a median full-time equivalent salary of just £29,129—considerably lower than the UK average of £39,039 in October 2025—many advisers feel their compensation does not reflect the professional nature, nor compensate for the emotional toll, of the job.
This financial strain, combined with a lack of clear career development (dissatisfaction at 34%), threatens a retention crisis. Approximately 31% of advisers have "often" considered leaving their role due to workload pressures, a figure that has remained stubbornly high since 2023. Currently, 11% of the workforce intends to leave their job within the next 12 months, with the vast majority of those (8%) planning to leave the debt advice sector entirely. The loss of these experienced professionals creates a damaging cycle: remaining staff face increased pressure, and valuable resources are diverted away from advice and into the constant training of new recruits.
The Failure of Traditional Support Systems
Organisational support for wellbeing is often perceived as inadequate or "tick-box" in nature. While many organisations offer Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs), advisers frequently view them as tokenistic or are too overwhelmed with work to actually access them. Some even report a mistrust of these services, fearing that their confidentiality might be compromised.
The workforce has expressed a clear desire for more specialised, clinical supervision to help manage the emotional weight of cases involving suicidal ideation and trauma. There is also a strong call for peer support and better collaboration with government bodies to reduce the administrative "red tape" that currently eats into advice time.
The MaPS Commissioning Framework: Critical Omissions
MaPS has acknowledged the importance of wellbeing in its engagement events, but there is a growing concern that these sentiments are not being translated into effective action. A review of the current framework reveals several "red flag" omissions:
No Salary Benchmarks: The financial templates contain no baseline salary expectations or requirements for inflation-proofing, leaving one of the primary causes of staff dissatisfaction unaddressed.
Lack of Workload Guidance: While client volume KPIs are included, there is no guidance on what constitutes a "safe" or sustainable workload, potentially incentivising volume over quality and safety.
Invisible Risks: The risk templates do not prompt bidders to conduct a detailed assessment of the impact of poor wellbeing on service delivery, such as recruitment or retention failures.
Health and Safety Gaps: There are no requirements for bidders to submit specific Health and Safety policies that address the mental health and wellbeing of staff.
Perhaps most concerning is the weighting assigned to these issues in the grant allocation process. In the draft scoring framework revealed to the sector by MaPS last month[3], "service design and delivery" accounts for 30% of the marks. Workforce wellbeing is just one of eight criteria within that section. This means that, in a competitive bid, the wellbeing of the advisers who deliver the service could represent as little as 3.75% of the total score.
Recommendations for a Sustainable Future
A sustainable service for clients can only be built on the foundation of a healthy, valued, and well-supported workforce, and the forthcoming commissioning round represents a pivotal opportunity for MaPS to move beyond rhetoric and embed genuine protections. Without explicit expectations regarding pay, workload safety, and professional support, the sector risks a continued drain of expertise and a decline in the quality of advice for those who need it most.
To secure sustainable capacity and better client outcomes, We Are Debt Advisers is therefore calling on MaPS to hard‑wire workforce sustainability into its commissioning process. That means setting explicit salary floors with annual indexation, publishing safe‑workload assumptions in a “should‑cost” model (minimum appointment/admin time and caseload ceilings), and funding clinical supervision and training to support career progression as core delivery costs. These elements should be assessed as a distinct, high‑weight criterion in the scoring so providers must evidence how they will protect adviser wellbeing, maintain quality, and retain skills over the full five‑year term.
MaPS should also require a simple monthly workforce dashboard (attrition, overtime, stress‑related absence, time to first appointment for vulnerable clients, and caseload per FTE) and allow providers to flex their budgets toward better pay and additional well-being support where risks emerge. Together, transparent cost assumptions, meaningful weighting, core funded training and routine reporting will align incentives away from volume‑only delivery and toward safe workloads, adviser retention, and consistently high‑quality advice.
Notes
[1] Casework requirements and workloads in the money advice sector, Institute of Money Advisers, January 2026.
[2] Where there is a delay in appointment lead in time this can lead to a ‘detriment’ being recorded against the adviser within the Independent File Review (‘IFR’) quality assurance process. Although the detriment occurs before the adviser even sees the client, this is still flagged up in the IFR and lowers their scores, contributing to stress.
[3] Community-Based Debt Advice: Updates Webinar, Money and Pensions Service, 11th February 2026, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZydLqHLaNg4