One would expect Caroline Flint to be dodging issues such as finacial education {re the Provident report}. In her constituency is the failed Earth Centre near Doncaster. She paid close interest to this "project" which squandered £60 million of National Lottery money. There has not yet been a compelling explanation as to where all that money went. Ther is no doubting that Flints constituency contains a great deal of poverty.However; she is the last person to be giving advice on financial expertiese,

john eadie macgregor, Doncaster, South Yorks

Don't outspend your income, simple as that.
If you live in a state-funded house with 7 kids who all need £200 Rockport shoes to kick the intellectual, nerdy, middle-class students heads in at school, have some control and stand up to your kids.
Applied mathematics needs to be taught in schools. When is the average person going to need to know: "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other 2 sides?"
Never, let’s face it, most of these people are just to slow-headed or poorly educated to know what 200% is, or even read something through before putting pen to paper.
This article appears to say that these companies are to blame and take advantage, I wonder if the real reason is chavs’ numerical blindness.

tom, uk,

I interviewed a local 'personal credit broker' as a witness in an enquiry and called him a loan shark to his face. When he finished his statement he defended himself. His suggestion was that he provided an essential function in the community, one that rich banks ignored. He said that as the government cut back on helping the needy and, as he put it, threw their cash at the undeserving rich, the need for his services increased. He varied his interest rates according to the risk but often got it wrong. He said that the fact that families were willing to accept such high interest rates was an indictment not of him but of the government and banks.

I'm not sure I fully accepted all his arguments but if you talk with his customers the question they ask is where else could they go.

Derek Smith, Brighton, UK