The Dutch have come up with a program that makes it okay for civil servants – who work for the country’s largest household debt creditor, namely the government – to violate people’s civil rights if they for example pay their water bill late because they had a large dentistry bill.

In my view, it constitutes a legalization of “grensoverschrijdend gedrag”.

This Orwellian monstrosity is called “vroegsignalering” and is being expanded.

Most citizens in the Netherlands don’t even know about this program, so they don’t know that they should never pay a bill late.

Granted, it does depend on which municipality you’re in.

As of 1 January 2021, so-called vastelastenpartners have a legal obligation within the Wet gemeentelijke schuldhulpverlening (Wgs) to alert local government about a household’s arrears. This concerns fixed expenses such as rent, possibly also water board taxes and income tax debts, local government taxes, energy costs, water bills and health insurance premiums.

Internet access or mobile phone costs are not included, but the legislation has room for them.

As result of this, vroegsignalering is often activated much too early. When people get pestered when there is no actual problem, it can increase mistrust – distrust – in democracy and in government. That, in turn, can drive people away from seeking support when they should.

All around the western world, not only trust in science and scientists, but also trust in democracy and government is declining. Those are worrisome developments that should be kept at the back of people’s minds when sculpting a process that is as eerily Orwellian as vroegsignalering.

In a 2023 IMF working paper (WP/23/92) that discusses effects of the European debt crisis (which started in 2009), the authors call household debt distress “an economic rather than a legal problem”. Irrespective of whether my interpretation of this is correct or even relevant, I think that it is very important to note this because vastelastenpartners see household debt distress as purely a legal issue.

In the same IMF paper, over-indebtedness is defined as a situation in which consumers are no longer able to meet their future financial obligations. The overall deterioration of people’s economic situation will then gradually lead to social exclusion, a higher cost of living (as the poor pay more) and a declining level of participation in overall economic development and social progress (which boils down to social exclusion), states this 2023 IMF paper.

Note that the declining participation in life in general and the increase in household expenses are results, not causes, of poverty.

Here we have another major problem within vroegsignalering. A frequent assumption appears to be that personal problems (such as mental health issues, addiction or an inability to keep track of expenses or to complete forms) are the cause of a household’s problematic financial situation. This assumption can be immensely off-putting and does not inspire trust in government and democracy either.

There is a huge lack of transparency within vroegsignalering.

For starters, it must be made very clear what powers the people have who start ringing doorbells, making calls and leaving cards and letters within this vroegsignalering process.

At the very least, the term vroegsignalering should also be mentioned so that people can at least search for it on the internet.

As long as this is not dealt with in a better way, this duty rests on the shoulders of the creditor who wants to start the process. That is the party who should give the debtor complete, transparent and clear information about the vroegsignalering process.

That party should also make clear that the debtor has the legal right to tell the creditor not to alert the local authorities.

The main goal of the vroegsignalering process should not be to ambush the debtor for the sake of enabling the creditor to show a court later that the debtor “refused” all assistance and paint the debtor as an uncooperative troublemaker.

If civil servants in the information handed to a debtor state that engagement with vroegsignalering is entirely voluntarily and without obligation, then that should stand for something in practice.

In the current situation, particularly the information provided to debtors about vroegsignalering is still often geared toward what the municipalities (and the creditors) need, which is to fulfill their obligations under the “Wgs” legislation.

The message is often “We don’t care about who you are, how you feel about any of this or about what you actually need. We have to do something and you’ll have to put up with it. If you don’t, we will label to you a troublemaker and that’s that.”

Creditors can even get away with refusing to give debtors a detailed justification of what debtors owe. They can inflate outstanding amounts too easily, merely to strengthen their claims in court.

Staff at the local municipality involved in vroegsignalering obviously can’t help with that. Debtors can be given the runaround when parties keep referring to one another as the source to contact and get this information from. When debtors still need to engage lawyers to extract that kind of information, this signals very clearly that vroegsignalering is not very effective.

Also needing to be guaranteed is absolute clarity as to who gives what kind of information to whom within this context. When debtors deal with various staff within the vroegsignalering process at the local municipality, they don’t know who has been given what information. It’s currently often clear that some information has been passed on between colleagues but the extent is not clear. This can cause a lot of confusion and uncertainty. It is a potential basis for miscommunications.

How come employee X knows that the debtor has energy bill arrears when the debtor has not told employee X about this? What else has employee X been told and by whom? Debtors should not have to wonder. These matters should be clear.

There currently is no uniform approach in vroegsignalering. What the local municipalities do depends on how much staff and budget they have available and on who runs which departments as well as on who the big commercial players are that are important for the municipality. It can just be a mere exercise of ticking the required boxes often enough.

As a result, there often is no awareness of the fact that information should not only be clear, transparent, complete and available in different languages, but that people from different backgrounds may experience debts very differently, hence deal with them very differently. They may also be highly alarmed by the immense invasion of privacy and erosion of agency that vroegsignalering can constitute.

In the United Kingdom, for example, where inequality is much greater than in the Netherlands, people whose behavior is exemplary and who have no arrears can be evicted too, through a so-called Section 21 Notice. For years now, the UK government has been saying that it wishes to abolish these so-called no-fault evictions. (December 2025: This has now finally been accomplished.) It’s It was even part of the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto. This has remained empty talk. It is an expression of inequality. Well-to-do people don’t rent. They don’t get served Section 21 Notices. They serve them.

As a result, whereas Dutch people may freak out over the threat of eviction, many Brits and people who have lived in Britain may not at all. This means that particularly Brits living in the Netherlands may not understand what all the fuss is about when people from the municipality start banging on their doors because they paid their water bill or rent late. They might do their utmost to pay their municipal taxes – council tax – in time, however. Because in the UK, those are priority debts and people can go to prison for council tax arrears.

Also owing to the lack of clarity (not just because for example the process is often activated too early, for legal reasons), completeness and transparency in the information handed to the debtors, vroegsignalering can quickly become highly counterproductive.

For people who are from countries with highly restrictive regimes, vroegsignalering activities may certainly cause a lot of stress and exacerbate the situation rather than resolve it.

The privacy violations committed during the execution of vroegsignalering appear to be legal as long as they are committed as part of the municipalities’ duties within the legislation (Wet gemeentelijke schuldhulpverlening or Wgs).

That’s a pretty shocking expression of inequality. People’s rights are ruthlessly eroded on the mere basis of the fact that they have one or more payment arrears and that their data were not yet included in one or both of the two databases of people with problem debts or were included, but longer than six months ago.

Data are currently kept for six months after which they are anonymized. Is there is such a thing as anonymizing people’s debts and personal situations? The data will likely always remain identifiable, also when the debtors and creditors’ names, addresses and date of birth have been removed.

This information, too, should be communicated to the debtors. There can be a complete lack of information and transparency in this regard. The debtor has no idea what to count on.

When people knock on debtors’ doors and have loud conversations through those doors with complete disregard for neighbors who may be able to hear the conversation in some apartment buildings, then that too is an expression of inequality.

A major component of vroegsignalering often appears to be the assumption that personal challenges, such as presumed autism, lead to debts, whereas most debts are purely the result of the fact that people’s fixed outgoings are much higher than their income.

If you have little income, you sometimes have to take a risk and shift your priorities temporarily. An example could be that someone decides to pay the rent late because it enables the person to start up a business that will quickly generate enough income. It could also be because the person is self-employed and knows that a good client will soon pay a large invoice but would like to make an investment now rather than in two months when a discount will have run out.

A parent can choose to pay late when an expense for a child takes precedence and the level of income is relatively low but still high enough to be able to make up soon.

It’s utterly nuts to send vroegsignalering staff over to bang on these people’s doors, but this is what currently happens in some municipalities. This may particularly be the case when it concerns for example rent owed to a real estate outfit with a large number of properties in the municipality.

By contrast, the Dutch city of Arnhem is launching a two-year project (spearheaded by city councillor Mark Lauriks, as announced on 23 April 2024) in which the city will actually pay all the debts of its 60 poorest households.

Arnhem city council acknowledges that debts can keep people stuck and can rob them of their headspace. People with long-term problem debts are no longer able to think about anything else other than their debts. It is good to point out that vroegsignalering can really add to that stress burden.

The annual amount spent in the Netherlands on helping people resolve their debts is currently EUR 17 billion, whereas the total amount of debts is only about EUR 3.5 billion per year. Arnhem’s city council noticed that.

• • The obvious conclusion is that it is much cheaper to pay the debts of the poorest to help them become unstuck.

• • The second conclusion is that you can see here that debts are a money-making business, an industry. That industry therefore generates an annual revenue of over 13.5 billion euro per year. The fees, fines and interest for example alone add up to a hefty total and that sum is not included in the 13.5 billion.

Arnhem’s plan is a two-year experiment that includes the option of “extensive counseling” to tackle related problems such as depression, social isolation and malnutrition caused by the financial challenges.

Many households in the Netherlands with problem debts owe as much as EUR 40,000. The largest debt amount found for the households in this experiment in Arnhem is EUR 18,000. Families with children will be given priority. The maximum amount to be spent on eradicating these people’s debts is EUR 700,000. Part of that also comes from for example utility companies canceling the debt.

This could be an example of what good can be done with vroegsignalering as it can help cities identify households that it might really be able to help this way. Hounding debtors and admonishing them as if they are 5-year-olds accomplishes nothing positive, by contrast, but just stresses people out even more and erodes confidence in government even further.

In some Dutch municipalities, the local government buys all the debts so that the municipality becomes the sole creditor. The long-term goal appears to be to lower the debtors’ stress levels, thereby increasing their health and enabling them to support themselves better again.

What local governments have to acknowledge is that most debts are a simple subtraction of a greater amount from a smaller amount. More money needs to go out than is coming in.

Even more and more Dutch higher-income households are getting into financial difficulty. This is not because they are learning-disabled or are struggling with mental health issues or alcohol. It’s because their expenses have gone up more than their incomings. They often do not apply for the tax benefits (“toeslagen”) that they may be entitled to. This is not because they do not know how to fill out the forms or because they are ashamed. It’s because these tax benefits are a major source of debts as they often need to be paid back again later.

Importantly, the echo of the child care tax credit scandal (“toeslagenschandaal”) – for which reparations have not completed yet and in some cases can never make up for the immense damage that was done – is still reverberating around the world. Between 2005 and 2019, approximately 26,000 parents were accused of major fraud, with very severe consequences for their lives. This failure of government was so impactful that many people understandably consider the risk associated with all toeslagen (Dutch tax credits) unacceptably high, for which they are admonished by the vroegsignalering people. Can you blame people for trying to avoid such horrors? The algorithm responsible for that childcare tax credits disaster also assigned a greater fraud risk to low-income households.

This scandal did nothing for people’s trust in government and democracy.

Moreover, it may be too well known that very little has been done to avoid a repeat. 

On 31 August 2024, Dutch newspaper Trouw published an article about a Dutch court case in Amsterdam involving a woman who took out a bank loan of 25,000 euro to be able to deal with the effects of that badly biased algorithm that incorrectly accused people of major fraud and ruined many people’s lives.

The judge in the case warned that a repeat of this type of drama is actually likely. The case itself too is an example of how regulations that on the face of it are designed to help people don’t. She did not qualify for assistance in June 2021 yet because her situation was not yet dramatic enough in June. Shortly after, in August, the bank did step up its attempts and her situation escalated, but by then she no longer qualified for help because she should have applied sooner, which she had done.

Also interesting within this context is that Princess Laurentien who’s been pushing hard for justice in the matter of the algorithm disaster was criticized so harshly by civil servants in the course of 2024 that she felt that it was better for her to withdraw. (She married into the Dutch Royal family.)

The lack of information associated with vroegsignalering – which can be carried out by the local government’s tax collection department staff – will make some people worry about whether they will end up on a list with an asterisk next to their name.

Another positive example is that on 26 April 2024, the province of Limburg (that is, Provinciale Staten; Jasper Kuntzelaers is in charge of mobility) decided to do something about that simple subtraction of income versus expenses by offering people on a low incomes free public transport on a major transit company’s trains and buses (Arriva’s) during non-peak hours. First, municipalities have to identify and approach these people. How this will be done is not clear to me, but this too could be where vroegsignalering might be able to assist.

This initiative can be a game-changer for many, for example, because it can help people break out of the social isolation that poverty can cause. It can also mean that less money has to go out, depending on circumstances; then you’re doing something about the outcome of that subtraction. But why only help people during non-peak hours?

The issue I have with these local initiatives is that they disadvantage others. Why does it have to matter that you live 10 meters beyond a province’s borders yet in the same country? Why should it make a difference whether you are dirt-poor in Arnhem or in Nijmegen?

What does the law state? “Discriminatie wegens godsdienst, levensovertuiging, politieke gezindheid, ras, geslacht of op welke grond dan ook, is niet toegestaan.” Tricky…

Some people decide to break out of the poverty stranglehold by living in a vehicle, which enables them to save up, sometimes enough to be able to purchase a home next. In the Netherlands, it is against the law to spend the night in a vehicle unless it is parked at an official campsite. In many countries, it is against the law to live in harmony with nature. Even if you own land that has a cave on it, it is usually against the law to live in that cave, regardless of how well kitted out it is and how low the impact on the surroundings is. Such mechanisms force people to keep putting money in the pockets of others and leave them with little leeway.

In the UK, there has been a televised experiment – called The Big Benefits Handout or The Great British Benefits Handout – in which families on benefits were given the full maximum benefits amount for a year as a lump sum. This was £26,000 at the time, which was around 2016. I was amazed to see the results. Even one guy’s business about which I had been very doubtful from the start did well.

One family apparently used less than half of the money to set up a business that they dissolved within two years, but they didn’t go back on benefits. They later said that the benefits handout had changed their lives 1,000 per cent. This was also because the broadcast made them popular, particularly because of the man’s chatty conversation style. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly after.

The only person who didn’t get out of poverty as far as I know was a woman who desperately kept applying for jobs and used the money to make herself look more presentable, among other things. Prolonged deep poverty affects what you look like quite profoundly. In the UK, this matters greatly.

In Denver, Colorado, 800 people without housing received up to $12,000 between July 2023 and July 2024, with no obligations attached. The Denver Basic Income Project has spent over 9.8 million dollars so far. While that may sound like a lot of money, it actually saved the city half a million. The founder and executive director is entrepreneur and philanthropist Mark Donovan. The project is headed by the University of Denver’s Center for Housing and Homelessness Research. It’s helping people support themselves financially and really makes a difference.

Prolonged poverty can cause you to look cheap and really dopey or even ill. It’s partly the result of stress and improper nutrition, but it’s not the full story. Prolonged poverty really shrinks your world. You lose sight of options that may be available to you, such as technologies that you can’t afford.

Your brain moves such things to the background; life is less frustrating that way so it helps lower your stress levels. It is a much more efficient way of one’s brain capacity, just like when you move to a different country, your mother tongue will eventually get rusty. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with your cognitive abilities. It’s just how the brain works. Prolonged stress doesn’t help. Blame it on cortisol.

It’s so sad to see consecutive UK governments to continue to regard supporting their citizens as a punitive process instead of as an empowering one. To a degree, that may be because it’s become an industry. The less efficiently these programs are run, the more money ends up going to the corporations that administer part of these programs.

In the US, the stimulus checks issued by the government to help them through the Covid pandemic enabled many people to lift themselves out of poverty, by contrast. While most people used it for household expenses, 15.7 per cent used the money to pay off debt and 14.1 per cent intended to apply most of it toward savings. There also was a huge surge in new microbusinesses, some of which went on to become hugely successful.

In the UK, many people were supported adequately but some who had just started a business or a new job fell into poverty because they received no support at all. In the Netherlands, support for small businesses including the self-employed may have been comparable to that in the UK. In the UK, no minimum income level was taken into account, whereas the Netherlands guaranteed financial support from at least the minimum benefits level.

In the Netherlands, however, it also later led to a large debt burden when some of the received business support had to be paid back.

I haven’t read or heard anything about Covid support in the UK or the Netherlands having enabled people to lift themselves out of poverty. I’d welcome getting your feedback as well as seeing more research into this.

On 24 May 2024, a Dutch news article announced that 600 families on benefits will be receiving EUR 150 a month extra, in a two-year experiment. These families are mostly single-parent households and they’re in Amsterdam, Zaanstad and Tilburg. The rigidity of the Dutch becomes evident when you then read that the amount of EUR 150 was chosen because it is the maximum amount that these households can receive freely without losing (part of) their benefits. Municipal regulations had to be adapted to make even this small change possible.

In other countries, similar experiments have sometimes resulted in people more actively looking for fulltime jobs and children doing better in school as well as in health improvements. The outcomes differ, however, and the researchers – led by Mirre Stallen – consider the Dutch situation unique relative to that in other countries.

In the same article, one expert comments that there research in the area of poverty and debt in the Netherlands is scarce. Many projects are proudly made public and are then never heard about again, she says. That same expert – Nadja Jungmann – is part of a commission that has recently has established that low income families in the Netherlands need up to several hundred euros per month more to make ends meet. However, for single-parent households, this is not the case; their level of income does meet their requirements.

I remember having been late with my rent in the past, when I was self-employed in Amsterdam. I received a letter about it and I called hurriedly to reassure them that there wasn’t a problem. One of my biggest clients paid well, but always paid late because their internal processes were rigid and sluggish. Whenever I was busy working with them, I wouldn’t take on a lot of other work. Being late with my rent once or twice wasn’t a problem. If needed, we would simply talk about something like this in those days, with mutual human respect and understanding. It certainly didn’t elicit contempt or belittlement.

Handling your money well can include deliberately paying one bill late, so that you can pay another invoice timely. You do this because you are on top of your incomings and outgoings, but simply aren’t wealthy enough or don’t have enough income to pay all your bills on time all the time. You don’t know that if you do that these days, you may get pestered by people from the municipality, but it all depends on which municipality you live in. The government obliges municipalities to carry out the legislation, but it has not told them how to do it. Some do almost nothing, whereas others act pretty aggressively.