National scandals and public outcries make excellent cover for bad news and as local authorities are forced to slash critical services, no one might notice until it’s too late
It’s last-minute budgeting time for hard-pressed local authorities. Many are caught between a rock in the shape of funding shortfalls and a hard place in the knowledge that cuts to services now will cost them dear in the future. The new financial year fast approaching. It’s time to issue those notices to quit and prepare the redundancy paperwork.
Meanwhile central government claims compassion for struggling families through tax cuts while leaving critical social services high and dry. It doesn’t look like their fault. Councils must make their own decisions. And anyway, nobody’s looking. Everyone’s watching what’s happening with the Post Office scandal.
Scandal doesn’t cover it. The corporate gaslighting inflicted on sub-postmasters did not stop with the Post Office. Nor with Fujitsu, which denied culpability for a failing software system. What about the justice system that caved? What about the series of ministers and whole governments who all knew what was going on? They did, because some of us have been following this story for years. For decades. It’s a fundamental lesson in injustice.
It’s because the communities we support don’t have a voice that we’re the easy meat to cut away when considering budget savings
For those of us who work in the social justice arena, we can see the gaslighting for what it is. The fall-out for the victims follows the same patterns as with domestic abuse. At such a scale, and with the State’s complicity, it’s a wonder more did not take their own lives. Scandal doesn’t cover it. Tragedy doesn’t cover it.
But what do we know? We’re just the professionals who pick up the pieces.
It’s because the communities we support don’t have a voice that we’re the easy meat to cut away when considering budget savings. Quids In’s money guidance programmes, and the support work delivered by Clean Slate (which runs Quids in!), is often described as preventative; helping people cope, reducing the likelihood of homelessness, promoting wellbeing, preparing people for employment… We must seem easy to dismiss as having unmeasurable value. You can’t count the soft stuff, right?
Wrong.
Joanne was one of our first participants in our money health check service in Bath, one of the authority areas where we’re under threat of de-funding. Joanne didn’t want debt advice as she “wasn’t that badly off”, but she casually mentioned dinner was quite regularly half a Pot Noodle. We invited her in. We ran through our Future-Proof Finance Quiz, which generated an action plan designed to enable her to eat a decent meal every night. She came in with a bag of unopened post, a red flag to the level of despair faced by many people not ready to face up the situation they’re really in. Buried in amongst it was a widow’s benevolent fund cheque for £3,500. We found she had a gym membership she didn’t use, so saved her £50 a month for that alone. A benefits check revealed she was entitled to more. In short, she was able to eat. Her mental health transformed. She felt more ready to start back to work. Call it prevention if you like, but for Joanne, the trauma had already happened. All we prevented was her fading away altogether.
We are being distracted with headlines about other social injustices
In the 22/23 financial year in Bath and North East Somerset we worked with 218 people just like Joanne. The average financial gain we generated was £465.54. For every pound of funding, residents benefited by nearly £3 (£2.82). That’s money spent locally. Staying out of arrears and less likely to face eviction, which reportedly costs landlords and local authorities at least £24,000. Able to eat better and less likely to require healthcare, saving the NHS. Able to cope and less likely to require mental health or care sector support, saving both the NHS and local authority money. The social return on investment is huge. And that’s before we get to the moral argument for protecting the poor and vulnerable in our communities.
The cuts this month to National Insurance will cost the Treasury £9 billion. Working households stand to benefit by an average £1,000 a year. The highest earners will save the most. But this is how Sky News reported on Rishi Sunak’s recent messaging on this: “The country will be ‘rewarded’ with tax cuts if the government is able to make it harder for people to claim out of work and sick benefits, according to the prime minister.”
We are being bought off with personal bribes through tax. We are being distracted with headlines about other social injustices. The agenda here is to starve struggling communities into submission. Work is good for people, we get it, (no, at Clean Slate, we really get it and see it every day), but coercing people in hardship offsets all the benefit and risks costing the taxpayer dearly. Force local authorities to take away the social safety net and those who fail to comply face destitution, homelessness, despair and an early death. Don’t talk about levelling up. This is a race to the bottom.
Image: Joe Shlabotnik / Flickr
