The letters go in a drawer you’ve stopped opening. Here is what nobody mentions at the drawer: since 6 April 2024, applying for a Debt Relief Order has cost nothing — the £90 fee that used to sit between an ordinary person and a fresh start was abolished. And if everything you owe comes to less than £50,000, a DRO might be the quiet, lawful end to all of it.
It is not a loan. It is not consolidation, or one of those adverts promising to “write off up to 80%.” A Debt Relief Order is a formal insolvency, run by the Insolvency Service, that freezes your qualifying debts for twelve months. If your circumstances haven’t improved by the end of that year — and for most people in this position, they don’t — those debts are discharged. Gone. Credit cards, overdrafts, catalogue accounts, most personal loans: the everyday debts that quietly doubled.
The catch isn’t the money. It’s the maze.
Because you cannot apply for a DRO on your own. That’s not a slight on you; it’s the law. The application has to go through an approved intermediary — a trained debt adviser who checks you qualify and submits it to the Insolvency Service for you. The good news is that the best of them are free: Citizens Advice, StepChange, National Debtline. The intermediary is the door out. But the appointment only works if you arrive with your affairs already laid out — and that is exactly where most people stall. Not at the door. In the weeks before it, at the kitchen table, defeated by their own paperwork.
You sit down to make the list and realise you don’t know your own numbers. Which debts even count? (Most unsecured ones do — credit cards, overdrafts, catalogues — but court fines and student loans don’t.) Do you qualify? The thresholds are precise and, since 28 June 2024, more generous than they were: savings and belongings under £2,000, a car worth less than £4,000, and not enough left at the end of the month to make your repayments. Miss a creditor off the list and that debt survives the order. Guess at a figure and the whole thing wobbles. So the letters go back in the drawer, and another month of interest does its quiet work.
None of that is your failing. The system asks a frightened person to produce an accountant’s tidy summary of the exact thing that frightens them most.
This is the part where it gets easier. Before that free appointment, you can put the picture together properly — calmly, once, in your own time. Chris is our technology for exactly this: you talk through what you owe and to whom, what comes in and what goes out, and together you build the two documents the intermediary actually needs — a clean schedule of every debt and creditor, and an honest statement of your income and expenditure. Not advice on what to do; that decision is the adviser’s, and rightly so. Just the paperwork that lets them do their job in one sitting instead of three.
So the day comes. You walk into the appointment — or dial in — and instead of a carrier bag of unopened envelopes, you hand over a list that adds up. The adviser checks it against the criteria, confirms you qualify, and submits the order. Twelve months later, an email arrives that you read twice to be sure. The debts are discharged. The drawer is just a drawer again.
A DRO isn’t right for everyone — it stays on your credit file for six years, and if you own a home or your debts run higher the intermediary will steer you somewhere better suited. That’s their expertise, and it costs you nothing. Chris’s job is smaller and specific: to make sure that when you reach them, you’re ready, and nothing gets missed.
If the drawer has been closed for a while, this is a low-cost, dignified way to open it.
The door’s still there whenever you’re ready to walk through it — come back and we’ll get you set.
Would you rather we drafted it for you?
Tell us what has happened and what you need. Every document is quoted case by case, on its size and the time it needs, and the price is agreed with you by email before any work starts. Nothing is charged until you say go.
Once agreed, it comes back to you within one working day (business documents usually within the hour). You read it, check every date and figure, sign it and file it: it stays your document throughout. No need to attach anything now — once we reply, you send your papers by email.
We use your details only to reply to this enquiry. eLitigant CIC is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. You remain the author of your documents.