No one discloses financial worries until it’s too late. We say don’t wait for that
One of the things we learned during lockdown was that once people trust us enough to talk about their money, they’ll tell us anything. It doesn’t take long to build this rapport, with a little active listening and motivational coaching, but the first few times the floodgates came down, it was a shock. But it meant we could also offer urgent intervention or signposting into safeguarding teams, mental health support and food programmes. All we’d called for was to check in to see if people could use some help keeping on top of their money.
We started to speak to people for whom the wheels were wobbling. Severely. But they hadn’t come off yet and they weren’t engaged with the right support to help them stay on the tracks. We could help with signposting and (more often than we’d anticipated) safeguarding interventions.
On 9 June, I’ll be talking about this at Homeless Link’s Prevention Into Action conference. There is an opportunity here. We know the groups most at risk of homelessness, so what if we offered a money health-check to all new users of mental health services or families struggling to keep households together? No one discloses financial worries until it’s too late, so we say don’t wait for that. Simply ask: “Don’t you want to be better off?” Who doesn’t?
We’re able to shine a light on help that seems hidden
When I say “all we called for…”, of course, money is core to everything. It can be the trigger and exacerbator of mental ill-health, for example. And financial hardship can sometimes be the consequence of low wellbeing, feeling “there’s no point”, less able to self-advocate and being generally overwhelmed. Some financial guidance and a friendly ear, we learned, could be enough to disrupt that pattern of hopelessness. Some quick wins, like a benefit check with a positive result or setting up a basic bank account so income swerves an account mired in overdraft, switches on a light at the end of the tunnel. For people in mental health services, it can be a catalyst for change in its own right.
The same is true for people slipping into arrears with rent, mortgage, bills or loan repayments. How many times have we heard that people simply buried their head in the sand? Often it’s because they don’t know where to turn before it’s too late and crisis support is required. We’re able to shine a light on help that seems hidden: council tax support, discretionary housing payments, alternative payment arrangements (for UC claimants). And we can signpost housing advice before it’s an eviction issue.
The Money Health-Check process we follow is a comprehensive triage that avoids intrusive questions by looking for simple yes/no responses. Asking direct questions like ‘Could you keep food on the table if your income stopped for a few weeks?’ and ‘Can you Google information and upload photos on Facebook?’ through to ‘Do you open your post every day?’ enables us to explore the habits, attitudes and facilities in play. (The questions are also designed with a transition to Universal Credit in mind, so we can try to head off the pitfalls ‘early adopters’ experienced.) It is presented like a quiz where a positive answer scores a point, so it’s kind of gamified and the quick wins feel like progress that will be recognised. Negative answers trigger a chunk of guidance explaining why action improves financial resilience. In the guided service, one of our coaches prompts a discussion to see what advice lands, allowing the participant to set their own priorities for action. In the public-facing self-serve version, there are videos to make the guidance as accessible as possible.
We jumped at the opportunity to talk at the Homeless Link conference because one application for our process is in preventing homelessness, not when eviction proceedings are under way (the wheels have come off) but waaaaaay upstream. Working with people from vulnerable groups way before even landlords or lenders are aware of potential future problems.
The challenge to evidence things that don’t happen is exactly why early prevention work gets less investment
There are opportunities for partnership working at scale and a network like Homeless Link can help to make that happen. We engaged 25 community partners across the country during lockdown on a digital financial inclusion programme called Nobody in the Dark, brought together by the Good Things Foundation and supported by Mastercard, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Lloyds Bank. Being digital and designed to be accessible for self-servers, the triage process is straightforward for a non-financial specialist to follow and can be replicated within existing services. Now we have developed a licensing offer and intend to build a national network of delivery partners helping to prevent homelessness.
Scale is important to this discussion too. Commissioners prefer interventions with tangible results and it’s easy to count the outcomes experienced by 50 people facing eviction. But to measure the impact of prevention further upstream, the counting has to be at scale; if a landlord with 30,000 tenancies averaged 150 eviction notices a year over the past five (normal) years, would early action reduce that number to 75? The challenge to evidence things that don’t happen is exactly why early prevention work gets less investment. And it really is an investment.
Clean Slate has deliberately avoided working in the regulated space of debt and money advice, sticking to guidance and signposting to specialist services. There is plenty of work to do here and the relationships with participants are less intensive and crisis-orientated. We can spend time on habits and attitudes, and on the groundwork to speed up the debt advice process, if they need it, like getting everything together for a budget review and opening bags of post, which every debt adviser has nightmares about and is exactly the reason we ask the question as part of our triage. Pun intended, we can provide some breathing space to debt advice services, while going through practical steps with people.
The thing about moving upstream to deliver early interventions is that it means swimming against the tide. I hope that at the conference I’m able to bring a few big fish with us. Who knows, maybe we can even turn the tide.
