The mailboxes hang skewedly on the gray fence of a dilapidated industrial estate in Amsterdam-Noord. There is no bell. ‘That is of no use to us,’ Anouk Mossel concludes. “We’re never going to find this gentleman here.” The social worker takes a green card with a callback request for the defaulter from her bag and puts it in a letterbox.
She cycles cheerfully to the next address. But nobody opens there either. She has better luck at the third address. At least. ‘I hear that the rent is not going so well,’ says Mossel to a woman who opens her front door a crack. According to Mossel’s data, the rent has not been paid here for several months. “That’s solved,” the woman replies. ‘And how’s it going? Are you okay with the energy?’, the social worker tries to keep the conversation going. The woman says there are no problems.
‘It’s the calm before the storm’, says Mossel when she is back on her bike. She works for the Vroeg Eropaf team in Amsterdam, and is doing her rounds of home visits. Ten addresses are scheduled this afternoon, and she’s going again tonight. Her target group: people who have not paid their gas, water, electricity, rent or health insurance. ‘During corona we received many reports about self-employed people, we now expect that the group of middle incomes will increase.’
Unsolicited help
Since 2021, fixed-cost organizations are obliged to report outstanding bills to municipalities at an early stage. In Amsterdam, but also in more and more other municipalities, these residents are then offered unsolicited help. Because, the idea is, the faster you offer help, the less likely that relatively small outstanding accounts will turn into problematic debts.
In 2021 the Vroeg Eropaf team in Amsterdam received 29,700 reports from people who had not paid their gas, water, electricity or rent, in the first seven months of 2022 there were already 18,252. After a report, the team has four to eight weeks to contact the defaulter. ‘In addition to home visits, we also send letters, text, call and email. We make about three to six attempts’, adds Colette Kooijman, Mossel’s colleague. ‘It is very busy now, so the question is whether we can maintain this frequency.’
Kooijman and her colleagues see it as ‘a sport to gain confidence and enter into dialogue’ with the defaulters. But that is not always easy. They notice that the allowance affair has left its mark. ‘For that reason I consciously do not say that the municipality finances us’, says Mossel. Fear of the government, she thinks is a big word. ‘But people no longer assume that the government wants the best for them. We also regularly see people who no longer dare to apply for benefits.’
energy poverty
‘It looks worrying’, says PvdA alderman Marjolein Moorman (Poverty and Debt Relief) that same afternoon in her office at city hall. She is updated every week by her officials about the inflation figures and energy poverty in Amsterdam, the city where the most poor live in absolute numbers. The charts on the table today do not reassure her. The number of applications to the food banks is increasing. “That’s a very steep line.” And the number of ‘early alerts’ by energy companies is already higher than the whole of last year.
Among other things, the cabinet has announced a price ceiling for energy costs and benefits and the minimum wage will increase by 10 percent. The municipality of Amsterdam has taken additional measures to help residents in financial difficulties. For example, extra money has been set aside for children of minimum income and people who are in debt restructuring and who are in trouble due to the high energy prices are treated leniently.
But to make sure that the aid reaches the right groups, the alderman wants more information. She wants to know who might literally be out in the cold next winter. Minister Rob Jetten (Climate and Energy) has promised that no one will be cut off from the gas. In practice, this means that energy suppliers have to make several attempts to contact the customer with outstanding bills, and they also have to offer the customer a lenient payment arrangement before they proceed with closing.
But Moorman expects the practice to be unruly. Because if an energy supplier eventually terminates a contract, the network operator will supply gas and electricity at market prices for a while before someone is actually closed. Only no one seems to know how long and how often this has been happening. Strange, she thinks.
To show how seriously she takes it, Moorman tells her officials that ‘I will break the law if necessary’. The alderman wants to find out as soon as possible where people live who no longer have an energy contract and who are in danger of being closed. She prefers to receive all the addresses from network manager Alliander so that the Vroeg Eropaf team can visit them. Only: there is no legal basis for sharing that data. Not yet anyway. She will ‘call Rob’ about this, she says, because Minister Rob Jetten is the one who can make this legally possible.
And she has more plans to keep people from getting caught out in the cold. For example, she is considering drawing up a blacklist of energy suppliers who nevertheless quickly terminate their contract. She recently heard about a case where a small energy company terminated the contract after only two weeks in arrears. ‘It was an outstanding account of 60 euros. In the current market it is not so easy to get a new contract: it is more expensive anyway and you often have to pay a deposit in advance. Then you are already many hundreds of euros further.’
Glorified postman
Sometimes welfare worker Anouk Mossel feels like a ‘glorified postman’, she says when she throws another card with a callback request through a letterbox. Hardly anyone opens this afternoon, and those who do say the problems have been solved. ‘It’s a matter of a lot of trying and patience. Sometimes you are unlucky, but it can also happen that you spend half an hour on the couch with someone who is very happy that you are coming.’
For example, her colleague Kooijman had a gentleman this summer who was lost in the bureaucratic jungle of the municipality. ‘He was on benefits and had moved. But his new address hadn’t come through well. Because he was no longer registered, his benefit was stopped, as well as his health insurance and benefits. He had missed all those letters. Because he lived very frugally, he only discovered a few months later that he had no money left. Subsequently, his Digid also no longer worked. But without a valid address he could not apply for a new Digid and without Digid he could not apply for benefits again. He didn’t know how to get out on his own.’
In such cases, it is very rewarding work, says Kooijman. According to the Amsterdam Early Eropaf team, it is ultimately possible to get in touch with the people in about 75 percent of the cases. In a large number of cases the response is ‘thanks for the offer, but I’ll solve it myself’, but the contact is still useful, says Mossel. ‘If this makes people pay their bills, you have set things in motion.’