This article is one of four published to mark the Money and Pensions Service’s Talk Money Week 2023. Its theme is ‘Do One Thing’ and Clean Slate* is calling on all stakeholders to encourage people in financial hardship to take the Quids in! Future-Proof Finance Quiz (a handy shortlink is available: qimag.uk/quiz). This plain English survey asks 25 simple yes/no questions to generate a customised action plan with ways for participants to reduce their spending, increase their income, reduce their borrowing and increase their savings.
Levelling up
Government is organised in siloes from Whitehall to the devolved administrations to local authorities. The only time they’re ‘in it together’ is when central government calls on every department to cut their budgets.
In his book End State, former government advisor James Plunkett describes how government needs to modernise to reflect the digital age. He describes it as an existential challenge to the civil service and uses the development of gov.uk as an example. To do what an online function of government must do, gov.uk has to integrate every team from the Home Office and HMRC to the DVLA and support with the cost of living. The specification is so wide ranging, it cannot be articulated until progress is made, and only then for the subsequent phase of development. This is not how change programmes are procured in the public sector. But it cannot work any other way.
The aim of levelling up is surely to increase the prosperity and living conditions of everyone across the UK
An example of the old way of commissioning is reflected in the government’s approach to Levelling Up and ‘procuring change’ through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. It addresses how deprived communities must be supported to address low outcomes on, say, employment/skills, health, education and housing. It recognises they impact each other but funding is organised one sector at a time. They’re like separate circles but modern systems-thinking would organise resources like a Venn diagram, each overlapping with all the others. And if they did, what would occupy the central intersection?
Poverty
The aim of levelling up is surely to increase the prosperity and living conditions of everyone across the UK. Yet financial wellbeing is barely mentioned. Conversations are taking place across the country on ways to respond to the cost-of-living crisis for people on low incomes. It feels like they’re in the eye of the tornado, the space where the wind goes eerily quiet. There is little or no investment in money guidance compared to crisis interventions like debt advice, mental health provision and tackling homelessness, under-funded though they are. To attract the resource to help people help themselves out of hardship and prevent those crises, financial resilience programmes must align themselves with strategies to tackle health inequalities, educational attainment, skills and employment and homelessness prevention. It is key to levelling up. But apparently this is as hard to grasp as poverty.
This article is the fourth of four published during Talk Money Week 2023. We wanted to present the argument for investment in money guidance and coaching from different perspectives. We’ve started with health inequality, housing/ homelessness and digital inclusion as our first themes because these are where Clean Slate has gained operational ground linking its work to strategies aligned with, but not directly focused on, combating poverty.
Economic growth vs the poverty trap
Local and regional economic plans often talk about increasing prosperity, reducing inequality and achieving sustainability. Such plans do not always acknowledge the hardship faced by communities or demonstrate an understanding of principles of equity, rather than equality, so recognising the additional support people on low incomes will need to take advantage of initiatives like skills programmes. College-based training to engage long-term unemployed people in deprived areas with A-level standard courses on cyber security or even hospitality (in tourist towns crying out for staff) will fail if no one there said that’s what they wanted. The poverty trap is about how it costs more to be poor. It is also about making people lose hope and seeing little point in trying anything. Failed programmes run the risk of making it look like the communities were the problem.
Investing in lifting people out of hardship will see all the indicators of disadvantage changing direction
The aim of increasing prosperity without acknowledging poverty runs the risk of exacerbating inequality. If wealth ever trickled down the way the likes of Liz Truss would like us to believe, it doesn’t now. Profits defy gravity and end up in the pockets of an ever-smaller clique of super-elites, ultimately at a global level. Meanwhile, people trapped in poverty are lodged there, with local authorities picking up the tab for all that comes with deprivation. The good news is that the reverse is also true: investing in lifting people out of hardship will see all the indicators of disadvantage changing direction. Help them lift themselves out of hardship and we can unleash the exponential benefits of re-activating people as part of the solution for themselves. (See our other think pieces for more on this.)
Clean Slate is well networked in many areas. Working within the eye of the cost-of-living hurricane gives us space to see things for how they are. Ask someone in economic development, employment or skills what they do about poverty and they tell us that’s the responsibility of community development teams, (in its widest sense, so including housing, social services and public health). Ask housing or social services what they do on poverty, and they’ll say they’re too busy picking up the pieces caused by it. Like with levelling up, personal financial hardship falls between stools. It’s time to join the dots between the two.
We’ll know when we’re winning the argument. Investment in money guidance to help people help themselves out of hardship should yield returns in terms of skills and employment, prosperity and inequality. It should also trigger outcomes saving the public purse on mental wellbeing, physical health, educational attainment, housing and homelessness, debt and child welfare.
*Clean Slate helps people on low incomes become better off. We do this by helping them re-organise their money and maximise their income, find work or better work, and get online. Quids in! is our money guidance initiative and in 2022, its materials – magazines, guides, personal finance emails and interactive tools – reached 240,000 people on low incomes across all nations of the UK. People we engaged one to one enjoyed financial gains on average of £1,224.
