?100,000 debtor's suicide prompts credit curb calls

The government should impose tighter controls on credit card companies, industry experts said yesterday after a man who ran up debts of £100,000 took his own life.

Dereck Rawson, 51, hanged himself at his home in Yaxley, Cambridgeshire, because he could no longer face the debt, most of it on 16 credit cards.

Mr Rawson's problems began 15 years ago when the sale of his house following the breakdown of his marriage left him with £10,000 in negative equity.

Although his weekly take home pay as a forklift driver was only £340, he was able to get more and more credit cards in an attempt to pay off his existing debt, most of which was acquired through penalty charges and interest.

Ian Richards, a counsellor with the UK Insolvency Helpline, wants credit cards to be regulated by the government to prevent such a tragedy happening again. He wants the amount individuals can borrow to be capped in the same way as mortgages.

"When you get a mortgage you can usually only borrow 3 times your salary. With credit cards there is no limit to what you can borrow," he said.

"All they care about it whether the customer is making his minimum repayments. If he is then he's considered to be a good payer. They do not care that he may be drawing on another card to pay off that one. It's often a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Mr Richards believes the government should set up a central register of borrowers with unsecured borrowing approved against an individual's national insurance number and a limit set for the maximum amount each person has access to. "The problem of unsecured borrowing will continue to grow until the government puts a limit on how much each person can have."

An inquest in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, heard that before his death Mr Rawson wrote a letter to his sister, Sheila Wade, asking for her forgiveness. It read: "Please forgive me for what I am about to do and that is to commit suicide. I've run up large debts with credit card companies and loans for the last 15 years.

"Now I can't pay the bills and the different companies won't leave me alone. Can you please get the police to come and find me in the bungalow."

In July last year, Stephen Lewis, a 37-year-old father of two from Worksop, Nottinghamshire, killed himself after running up £70,000 in debts on 19 credit cards.

The Citizen Advice Bureau said that its research suggested a significant proportion of the UK's population were grappling with unmanageable debt.

A spokeswoman said: "The credit boom of recent years has ... has helped raise standards of living generally, but it is also taking a huge toll on the lives of those who find themselves on the wrong side of a very narrow dividing line between successfully managing credit commitments and plunging into serious debt ...

"We want to see specific measures to ensure lenders take into account people's ability to repay before they offer them credit."