Of course money can help someone out of a crisis. But surely we can tackle the root causes too
I wondered if, post-pandemic, we’d see a public call for more of a levelling of society. A bit like after the two world wars, where people of very marked class distinctions had spent the worst of times shoulder to shoulder. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t feel like the worst of times is over, lurching from the global health emergency to a cost-of-living crisis, as if the latter is not also killing people, but things aren’t rebalanced the way I’d hoped.
Sometimes there’s a subtle difference between empathy and sympathy. I guess the former is what we experienced during lockdown. The latter is where we are now. Financial hardship is always happening to someone else: We want to help but we’ve just got to tighten our own belts first. Those poor people forced into foodbanks… Shame I can’t donate to them the way I used to.
There’s not the antipathy towards people in hardship like there was in pre-pandemic days. Think Benefits Street on TV. Even the government stepped up a bit to provide cost-of-living help with bills last winter, albeit to all of us, not just those in most serious need. There’s also the Household Support Fund, which is not nearly enough but something to take the edge off, and at least local authorities can try to ensure the neediest receive the help.
What will be strange to many reading this is that I don’t think money is the answer
It’s strange to me that a Conservative government is throwing money at things like poverty. Yes, when cornered, ministers will still say the best way out of poverty is to find employment. Like it’s okay to leave people not able to work in destitution. Since the pandemic, the magic money tree might have a few branches lopped off, but it’s still doling out a little cash.
What will be strange to many reading this is I don’t think money is the answer. Not in itself, at least. Cash to make ends meet just plugs a gap. Like other crisis interventions, like debt advice sometimes (but not always), a quick fix can be very temporary if it doesn’t change the fundamentals. Many services will furnish users with some extra benefits and a new budget to stick to but without the emotional buy-in from participants the biggest risk is people will run up further debt expecting help and a bailout.
Money guidance, especially when delivered through coaching, will help individuals help themselves. It can help people identify the causes of their need for a hand-out or crisis intervention. It can shine a light on the things people didn’t know were available to them; a simple online benefits check, discretionary housing payments, food clubs or pantries (rather than foodbanks), switching services, or social tariff services, for example.
Quick wins not only free up a hamstrung budget, they show things can be done. People just don’t feel they have access to the information. So many times, people have asked Quids in! staff: Why doesn’t anyone tell us this stuff? Well, that’s why we’re here. Starved of basic information, they feel like they’re being kept in the dark. Nothing will make a difference. There is no hope.
People are transformed from passive recipients of help into active participants
Over time, quick wins become successful applications for benefits, white goods to store and cook cheaper meals, and walks to school that notably free up cash for breakfast. As trust builds, momentum grows and expenditure goes down. Importantly, the 12 to 18-month delay between slipping into financial trouble and accessing debt services can be truncated to just a few weeks, with a coach walking participants through an income/ expenditure review and helping them open the red letters. It lays the foundations for specialist support when it’s needed, but it also wraps self-help around the process.
People are transformed from passive recipients of help into active participants, an additional asset, part of the solution – and someone to share this secret knowledge with their own communities. (You know, the way well-off people share tips on avoiding tax or the cost of care in older age.) This doesn’t change deficit budgets, of course. But a change in outlook can do wonders for many people’s employability – Tory grandees take note!
Money guidance and coaching is a distant cousin to the technical process of debt advice. Its parents are nurturing and progressive, promoting resilience and problem-solving, where their sibling’s tendency is to sort things out and give them what they need. (Until the next time.) And it’s a poorer cousin. Policy-makers don’t seem able to join the dots between ‘people should sort themselves out’ and ‘people should be shown how’.
And yet money coaching rarely features in policy or large-scale commissioning. Financial wellbeing for deprived neighbourhoods is central to the Levelling Up agenda but is it mentioned? Barely, if at all. Instead, the causes and outcomes of financial hardship are all over it: Educational attainment, health equality, employment… It’s weird. And it makes the impulse to throw money at domestic financial crises all the stranger.
The consensus is that people deserve better. Patching up need is not a lasting solution, though
We need to mainstream money guidance and coaching. It addresses the stem cause of financial hardship, not the root, which is probably political and much to do with a capitalist economy. Debt and housing insecurity and health inequality are all branches off it. It puts the people affected at the centre and makes them part of a strategy to prevent ongoing problems.
I’ve been to a number of conferences recently where the consensus is that people deserve better. That communities have lost hope. And that there is not enough advice (delivered one-to-one) to go round. Patching up need is not a lasting solution, though. It’s time to scale up whatever it takes to engage and inform people, and provide them with adequate support, to become the start of a solution to their own problems. It gives them control and empowers communities. In turn, this frees up specialists to do the work only specialists can do.
