Sefton’s Neighbourhoods Team, Migrant Workers Sefton Community and England Illegal Money Lending team have worked together with Multimedia Company 'Handstand Films' to produce a video which will publicises the issue of loan sharks across Sefton.



Sefton’s Neighbourhoods Team began working with Sefton Workers Migrant Community earlier this year, after one of their volunteers attended a meeting in Southport and mentioned to the group that the issue of illegal money lending was a current problem within the migrant community in Southport and admitted that he did not know what a credit union was.

A subsequent meeting between the England Illegal Money Lending Team and Migrant Workers Sefton Community Charity highlighted a number of possible actions that could be carried out to increase the resilience around this issue for the migrant community within Southport.

As a result MWSC’s volunteers received training to now be able to advocate and provide advice around reporting any victims to the Illegal Money Lending Team’s national Helpline.

A meeting was set up between MWSC and Sefton’s Credit Union so that the MWSC volunteers are able to give residents advice and make appointments to the Credit Union to provide a viable alternative to approaching a loan shark.

The video highlights that this issue can affect anybody because of the everyday financial pressures that can hit a family hard and they feel that the only place left to turn is to a loan shark.

The video has been produced in such a way so that it can be translated into any language and with the help of MWSC the video has already been produced in English, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian and Latvian.