Wife's prev marriage debt

Raffers

I'm looking for a bit of advice here about a small joint debt accrued equally between my wife and her previous husband a few years ago.

I don't know all the full facts, but it would appear to have been a default on catalogue payments. As far as I understand it, the debt was under £100. In the last few months, and increasingly more recently, we've been getting automated phonecalls from 'Wescot' with a recorded woman's voice asking my wife (with her new married name) to call their 0844 number and quote a reference. These are daily now. We don't answer them, as it is always from an 01482 number.

Letters occasionally come to the house, like today for example - she has two letters (I haven't opened them) from PO Box 123 Burton On Trent DE14 2XE again which seem to be from a debt collection agency.

The conversations I've had with her about this were about the level of the debt, which is small. She maintains that it was jointly accrued by both her and her ex husband. I believe that she's previously been in contact with someone at some organisation to say that she's prepared to pay the original debt but not the 'interest' the collection agency have apparently hiked onto it. (I don't have any specifics on this at the moment).

Since the debt appears to be modest and well within our ability to pay, I'm wondering what the right thing to do here is...

We could simply phone up, find out what's owed and pay it there and then. We could stick to our guns and only agree to pay the original debt, not the interest. We could continue to ignore their attempts to contact us, hoping that they'll eventually give up (does that happen?) or we could complain to them or to some other organisation about them?

PS, we live in Scotland if that makes any major difference (even though the companies trying to contact us are a mixture of Scottish and English).

PPS, I have no idea if they are separately also trying to contact her ex husband. We have no contact with him and do not know where he lives. I'm wondering if they are only persisting with my wife because they cannot trace his whereabouts.

Thanks for reading and all help/advice welcome.