Decision-makers don’t always see the people whose life chances depend on their policies. And that’s a problem

At Clean Slate, one mantra we live by is ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’. Whether it’s access to passported benefits or the secrets to a great CV, sometimes it just takes the sharing of the right information to make a breakthrough.

But this applies equally to those who hold the pursestrings. They don’t know what they don’t know either. This leaves the risk that decision-making isn’t as informed as it could be – yet often it ploughs on oblivious to the information shortfall.

We only have to look to Universal Credit and the assumption that everyone has enough in the bank – or family wealthy enough to help out – to see them through the initial five-week lag. (Of course it assumed too that everyone can and does have a bank account.)

We know exclusion is a problem but the move to inclusion is slow. Including the voices of those who need support, a true ‘nothing about us without us’ approach, is vital if we want to keep pace with the shifting sands of life on a low income.

A visibility issue

Clean Slate’s Voices programme is a simple idea to increase the visibility of the people we work with. Hand the mic to the people who use the services to find out what works and what needs to be fixed.

What Voices does really well is illustrate how varied and complex are the reasons for falling into financial hardship. It’s all very well telling people to find a job – or to find a better job if they’re already working – but if your money is being controlled by an abusive partner then even a better salary isn’t going to help you navigate the cost-of-living crisis.

Rachel (not her real name) told Voices what her life was like when her partner controlled her money.

“I used to be self-employed,” she says. “I’d pay my own bills and have my own money but then I lost my job, he moved in and started his own business and all my [child tax] credit stopped. All his earnings were in his bank – he wouldn’t put me anywhere near the money.

“I had to beg him, ‘look, she needs some shoes, can I have some money for shoes?’ I’ve never begged for money off anyone, it’s the worst thing in the world.

“After the bills, I’d have something like £60 a month left. That’s for fuel, food, and everything else.”

And when Debbie needed help, she came up against a system that wasn’t tuned in to recognise her problems. Due to COPD and diabetes, her partner’s health had deteriorated to the extent that he could no longer work. When Debbie’s job, which had been home-based due to Covid when she was hired, needed her to attend the workplace she was left with a commute involving three trains and costs that ate up most of her pay.

But state help wasn’t immediately forthcoming.

“Universal Credit wasn’t giving us any money because they were saying we could both work,” she told Voices. “And we were like, ‘But we can’t. I can’t work because I [am] making  a loss, and he can’t work any more, full stop. We need help.”

With support from Clean Slate, Debbie and her partner were eventually awarded PIP and Universal Credit, and Debbie was back in full-time work shortly afterwards. But that the system can miss someone like Debbie, when they’re genuinely and seriously in distress, shows the shortcomings. There were a lot of boxes she could have ticked if only those boxes had been thought of by policy-makers.

She says now: “If I can help anyone in that situation, I would. It’s just getting to that stage. It’s getting to that first day. It’s being shown where that step is.”

Falling into homelessness

The support announced by Rishi Sunak last month to help households weather the cost-of-living and energy crises was roundly welcomed as a move that will bring relief to millions. But while the Chancellor’s plan addresses the acute pain of rising living costs, it isn’t going to cut through to the underlying issues of rising private rents and the freeze on local housing allowance, which determines the amount of housing benefit for private renters.

At the Scottish Housing Festival, hosted by the Chartered Institute of Housing in Glasgow last month, housing lawyer Mike Dailly gave a keynote speech in which he outlined just how much the finite supply of social housing has impacted on private renters.

In short, the Chancellor’s support package fails to see the whole picture. It just won’t be able to keep pace with the overheating private rental market (Dailly said, for example, that in Scotland the market has trebled in size in just 20 years).

Rather than time-limited handouts, he called for two things to tackle the crisis in a serious and sustainable way – a temporary rent freeze in the private sector, and a massive and urgent project of social housebuilding.

Homeless charity Shelter also highlighted this issue in a recent blog, warning that homelessness remains a real risk for many households, despite the short-term relief promised by Sunak’s support – because the real cost of renting just isn’t on the radar of decision-makers.

If these households aren’t visible then helping them before they fall into homelessness becomes almost impossible. The same goes for those who are at risk of falling from ‘just about managing’ to living in poverty.

A new vow

The summer Quids in! magazine addresses visibility and provides a space for the people Clean Slate supports. They explain in their own words what they needed back when they were really struggling and what they need now that they’ve turned a corner.

Clean Slate recently adopted a pledge that encapsulates our mission and the fact that we go on to employ people whose journey started with our services. It says simply: “We see you. We hear you. We are you.”

This promise starts with seeing people, and seeing their circumstances. 

If the people who need support aren’t visible and their lived experiences aren’t understood then decision-making can’t possibly be any more than a best guess.