This article is one of four published to mark the Money and Pensions Service’s Talk Money Week 2023. (Updated in October 2024.) 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. He argues that competing and complementary departmental objectives need to be aligned. He presents the development of the gov.uk website as a painful example of the work that is essential to harmonise priorities. 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. More recently, governments have acknowledged the need for multiple departments to address levels of unemployment caused through ill-health. It remains to be seen how well this plays out in practice.
The aim of levelling up is surely to increase the prosperity and living conditions of everyone across the UK
The former government’s approach to Levelling Up and the UK Shared Prosperity Fund addressed employment and skills, health, education and housing. It recognised the issues impact each other but funding was organised one sector at a time. They were addressed like separate circles when they are more of a Venn diagram, each one overlapping with all the others. Systems thinking is required. This may be starting to happen with a move towards a priority for health-based support for long-term unemployed people but there are barriers to overcome that are as cultural as they are financial.
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. At a local level, 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.
Clean Slate has found the main way to attract the resource to help people help themselves out of hardship is to demonstrate how we can reduce these indicators of deprivation. Financial resilience programmes must align themselves with strategies to tackle health inequalities, educational attainment, skills and employment and homelessness prevention. Financial resilience is key to levelling up and impacts people’s whole live, but is treated as a bolt-on to other programmes.
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 started with health inequality, housing/ homelessness and digital inclusion as our first themes. These are where Clean Slate gained operational ground by linking its work to strategies aligned with, but not directly focused on, combating poverty.
Wants and needs, hearts and minds
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. They need to recognise the additional support people on low incomes need to take advantage of initiatives like skills programmes. Crucially, the opportunities we create must engage with their wants and provide for their needs.
I heard about a plan to deliver A-level standard courses on cyber security aimed at engaging unemployed people in deprived areas. I wondered who had been consulted. No jobseeker I’ve ever met over 18 years at Clean Slate would have felt ready in this, let alone interested. I was worried jobseekers would feel alienated, which would exacerbate their sense of hopelessness. Worse, ill-conceived programmes that fail make it look like jobseekers are the problem.
Investing in lifting people out of hardship will cause all the indicators of disadvantage to change direction
The aim of increasing prosperity without acknowledging poverty will exacerbate inequality. Wealth doesn’t ‘trickle down’. In this age of global, digital trade, wealth defies gravity and ends up in the pockets of an ever-smaller clique of super-elites. What we need is empowered communities that nurture aspiration, where residents can improve the quality of their lives.
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 cause all the indicators of disadvantage to change direction. There are exponential benefits to be had by re-activating people as part of the solution.
I once asked someone in economic development how their strategy addresses poverty. They told me that’s not their role. It would be the responsibility of community development, public health and social services teams. 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.
Investment in money guidance not only triggers large financial gains for individuals. It frees up their emotional bandwidth to think longer term about their health and wealth. Helping people out of hardship yields returns in terms of skills and employment, prosperity and inequality. It also triggers outcomes saving the public purse on mental wellbeing, physical health, educational attainment, housing and homelessness, debt and child welfare.
It requires systems thinking at all levels of government.
*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 2024, its materials – magazines, guides, personal finance emails and interactive tools – reached 175,000 people on low incomes across all nations of the UK. People we engaged one to one enjoyed financial gains on average of £1,328.
