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First of all, you need to see all the money you have coming in. Put together a financial picture of your spending using either the printable form or a spreadsheet. This is the first important step to debt recovery.

This budget will show all income and expenditures, and you will classify them as necessary expenses and non-priority debts, and also what you are currently repaying to your debts.

Maximize your income:
Research to see if you are making all the money you could be. For instance, see if you qualify for Working or Child Tax Credits, Income Support, JSA, Disability, or Housing and Council Tax Benefits.

Figure out necessary expenses:
Necessary expenses are the things you must pay to keep a roof over your head, such as rent or mortgage, gas, electric, water and/or sewage. Other expenses may be groceries, telephone, TV license, travel costs, CCJ ruling or magistrates court fines, housekeeping, and clothing.

Priority debts:
Priority debts are the back payments you may already owe on your necessary expenses. You should take care of these debts as immediately as you can by contacting the creditor and negotiating a payment plan. The worst thing you can do is to ignore the creditor, because then the creditor can take action against you and your situation will worsen. Once you have made a repayment plan, keep with it and pay down your debts as promised.
On the budget you are putting together now, you should include daily expenses and the repayment of priority debts. Any money left over from your income should now go to non-priority debts.

Non-priority debts:
These debts could include credit card debt, or other money owed to banks, catalogues, finance companies, etc. These are considered non-priority debts because the penalties for not paying them are usually not as serious as priority debts.
If you stop paying on a loan or credit card debt, the company can get a CCJ, where the take the debt to the county court to get a judgment for you to pay. However, this court action does not mean you have to drop all over expenses and pay this one. The court will take into consideration your necessary expenses and then decide how much you can afford to pay on the debt.
List non-priority debts or credit card debt on your financial worksheet. The income leftover from necessary expenses should be divided among these non-priority debts. You should divide the payment fairly and pro-rata, meaning the biggest non-priority debt gets the largest amount of repayment, and the smallest non-priority debt gets the lowest amount.

Communicate with your creditors:
This step is very, very important. If you do not talk to your creditors, they assume you do not care about repaying your debt, which is not true if you've made it this far. Finish your financial worksheet, then send a copy of it to each creditor with a letter telling them you cannot keep up the payments by contract, but are instead willing to negotiate a plan of repayment. Now you are on your road to debt recovery!