More than one in eight Dutch people leave government bills unpaid: ‘Accept that not everything will come back’

To reduce the number of people in arrears even further, there is no other option than to cancel the debts in the most serious cases, says Nibud director Arjan Vliegenthart in a response to the figures. According to Nibud, the ‘hard underlay’, as he calls the serious cases, cannot be helped with ordinary debt counseling, but must be able to start with a clean slate.

These are large sums of money: the total amount that defaulters have to repay is close to 12 billion euros — about the total budget of a small ministry.

The number of people who are behind in paying a tax bill, a traffic fine or overreceived benefit or allowance is decreasing, however, by just under 10 percent between 2022 and early 2024. The amount for which these people are indebted is growing.

The amount that defaulters owe to DUO has actually decreased slightly, despite the loan system of recent years. The fact that the number of defaulters is relatively high in (student) cities is because households are generally poorer there.

Other figures also show that the average backlog has become more persistent in the past two years. A quarter have debts to at least two government agencies; This group has shrunk proportionally less than the total group of defaulters. There are also more debtors who have been behind for more than six months.

The trend is very similar to that of other poverty figures: things are certainly not bad, but the pace at which the figures are improving has slowed down in recent years. The number of people who have not paid health insurance premiums for more than six months was higher than the year before for the first time in years, as was the number of people who have to live on less than social assistance. There are also more and more Dutch people who have difficulty paying their energy bills.

Despite these statistics, there are plenty of people who can simply catch up with a little help, says Maarten Bergman, who has been training debt counselors for more than twenty years. He points to the low number of people who receive debt assistance at all. “Municipalities do not know how to reach a large group of debtors. They are people who do not come to such a counter of their own accord because the involvement of the government scares them off.” Moreover, such a municipal counter does not provide customization, while that is necessary, says Bergman.

His solution: a counter in which the municipality is not prominently involved, so that people feel less burdened, and ensure that people are ‘picked up’ soon after they have run into financial problems. “If the financial problems are not too big yet, it is also easier to tackle them. At the same time, canceling debts is certainly a solution in a number of cases.”

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Director Arjan Vliegenthart of Nibud sees it differently. He believes that ‘a different approach must be taken’ to reduce the number of defaulters even further. “We are in good economic times, wages have been rising by more than 6 percent for two years in a row, people have benefited from this and have paid off their debts,” he says. “Now that that has happened, we are touching the hard lower layer, which cannot get out of debt in this way.” According to him, the government must learn to live with the fact that not all debts are repaid.

Anyone who thinks that all that money will come back without debt restructuring is fooling himself as far as the Nibud director is concerned. “Some people don’t have enough income to get out of debt. Debt relief only helps a few percent of the people who use it, while billions are pumped into it every year. Then remediation, starting with a clean slate, is really the best way to help part of this group.”