Knowing the right questions to ask and having the chance to ask them

A 79-year old relative of mine died a couple of years ago after visiting his GP with chest pains. ‘It’s probably a strain. Come back in two weeks, if it’s no better.’ Less than a week later, he was blue-lighted into Kings College Hospital. A week or so later, he was no more.

Systems are fallible and I often think of John, (let’s call him), when I think about this. They fail when success relies on people pushing back, asking questions, seeking help for themselves and/or demanding a second opinion.

That is, systems fail people from certain backgrounds… people with English as a second language, people brought up in what would have been called working class backgrounds, like John, and people on lower incomes, which is perhaps less often recognised.

How can we change the conversation and give people the means, motivation and power to speak up and be heard? The Office for National Statistics says poorer people die an average ten years younger so how do we level the playing field? The status quo is maintained when people don’t know what they don’t know, so how do we ensure nobody is left in the dark?

Practical barriers

For people less fluent in the prevailing local language, there are practical barriers. Information is generally published in English. Support workers, GPs and council staff are more likely English speakers. For the people our East London team works with, for example, this opens up people who mainly speak Bengali to exploitation from loan sharks.

Like with disability, society has a duty to step in when barriers facilitate inequality. There are many reasons people don’t speak the local language. Ex-pat Brits don’t always feel they need to learn the language if a decent life can be achieved without it. But in the UK, if you’re on a low income, you’re highly likely to miss out without decent English. I’m don’t think ‘learn English or starve’ is a particularly edifying message about life in Britain. (Sidenote: I ran a digital skills workshop in East London where half the attendees struggled with English. Google Translate was a gamechanger. I’ll save that story for another time.)

Cultural obstructions

I made the distinction above between class and economic status. It hasn’t been fashionable to talk about class for a while, except in an abstract and sometimes privileged way: ‘I’m from a working class family but now I’m middle class because I have a good job, a house and money.’ But while class and money are intrinsically linked, how we’re brought up has already bred into us a sense of ‘knowing our place’. We really have to lean into our later-life privilege to make it as a politician or business leader without a debilitating sense of imposter syndrome.

But, like my relative, John, we don’t have to be broke to be working class. Like in the old sketch from the 1960s, we know our place. When someone from a profession, like a GP, tells us we’re okay, we respect our ‘betters’.

For people on low incomes, it seems the world is getting away from them. ‘I’ve missed the boat to get online,’ they will sometimes say. They don’t want to be talked down to by well-meaning volunteers or workers for institutions – whether banks, authorities or even Citizens Advice. They fear looking stupid or being judged. And often, they have been so left in the dark, they don’t even know what to ask for and who to ask.

Joining the dots

I’ve recently been speaking to policymakers and business leaders in Bath. They want to know why there are so many unemployed people in the outlying areas of the city and wider area but so many vacancies they cannot fill in the centre. ‘Clearly,’ they often say, ‘these people lack aspiration’. But I’m pushing back. 

The people that Quids in! engages aspire to more money in their pockets. They aspire to providing better for their kids. But we also know many people who live no more than 25 minutes’ walk from the city have never visited the Royal Crescent, the Circus or the streets with the high-end shops. If they feel like the city centre is ‘not for people like us’, how are they ever going to want to work in a five-star hotel there?

If we want to join the dots between opportunities and the people missing out on them, we need to think differently and understand why people don’t come forward. There are a bunch of dots in between them that neither party has noticed yet.

Watching your language

Part of the solution is to find new approaches to engagement and information-sharing. There is an assumption that unemployed people are actively job seeking. Emails go out to them assuming they are regularly online and checking their emails, but also offering them access to skills programmes and help with their careers. Remember? They just want a little extra cash and to do more for their families.

Systems and professionals that rely on people in hardship to step up are just going to fail. They need to appeal to their needs and wants. This is what Quids in! Money Guidance programmes offer. We offer people the means to meet that need and, then, while they’re at it, the chance to explore what else they might do. 

Once we’ve saved them a little because we walked them through comparing insurance or broadband prices, and once they’ve picked up a little extra because they used a benefits calculator, they want to know what else is out there. Well, there’s a number of things… Now let’s look at whether a few hours paid work would leave you better off. (Spoiler Alert: For people on Universal Credit, it does.)

Anyone working in the community and wanting to offer money guidance can take this approach. They can even licence our Money Health Check app to do it. But systems need to be recalibrated. And professionals funded to engage communities need to be acknowledge that failing to do so is on us, not them. That includes everyone, right through to health professionals, which might mean people like John don’t die before their time and might mean life expectancies for both rich and poor start to level up.

Image: Mamontova Yulia / Shutterstock