“We don’t tend to talk to people from low-income households about ‘crisis’ when struggling with the cost of living is business as usual.”

I was talking to friends in Bristol last week about the impact of Covid on low-income households. We talked about how social crises almost always hit people in poverty hardest. Globally, this applies to climate change too. With the pandemic, however, what we experienced was additionally influenced by governments’ varying responses, existing infrastructure and sometimes geography. Lockdown or not. Free access to healthcare or not. Island nation or not.

Sometimes, but absolutely not always, the key determinant is economic status (which often overlaps with ethnicity anyway). In the UK, I reflected, low-income households that Clean Slate worked with were already ‘in crisis’ long before the pandemic hit.

For them, the pandemic was almost a financial reprieve. This was not because there was more money. Nor was it only because there was suddenly funding for a money coach to spend some time with them to bolster their financial wellbeing. It was just that the struggle, and a world of uncertainty, was an experience shared by nearly everyone. It wasn’t levelling up exactly, more levelling down.

Millions of previously working individuals were forced onto Universal Credit. Being a claimant was more like the norm. Suddenly these people too had to make meagre ends meet, just like working age people who had been unable to work had been doing for a long while. 

Job Centres were no longer on people’s backs to find work. Instead, the DWP commissioned programmes to promote people’s financial wellbeing through advice and guidance.

Rethinking Crisis

At Clean Slate, we don’t tend to talk to people from low-income households about ‘crisis’ when struggling with the cost of living is business as usual. Often when people apply for a ‘crisis grant’, they just see it as the name given to a little extra help. It’s more of a crisis situation in the eyes of people for whom being forced to live on Universal Credit would feel like an emergency.

That said, genuine ‘tipping point’ emergencies do happen, like needing school uniforms for the kids, the washing machine breaking down, or waiting five weeks until payday with no food in the house. When your gas boiler breaks down, it’s an emergency. Now imagine it breaks down every day. Calling out an engineer to repair it is just your daily routine. Now imagine one day that engineer says, ‘here’s a new boiler and it will hardly ever break down’. And what if she says, ‘And I’m going to show you how to fix it in case it does.’

That’s the shift we aim for.

During the pandemic, our organisation expanded six-fold in eighteen months and we delivered the Quids in! Money Guidance programme to thousands, including through third party community organisations who used our toolkit to support their local residents. It was a mobilization of commissioners who wanted to help. It showed what’s possible when systems invest properly.

And we’ve continued to build on that.

In Bath and North East Somerset, we work with the local authority to help circulate crisis grants paid for by the Household Support Fund. At first, we were hesitant to put strings on what is ostensibly for emergency help. We wanted to see, though, what we could achieve by making financial guidance a requirement of access to the payment. There were still other routes to the support without such strings, but could we help stop the revolving door of needing financial aid?

In just six months, (from April to September 2024), we supported 112 people who each received £150 in crisis grant payments. We walked each of them through the Quids in! Money Health-Check and provided just two to three weeks’ coaching to put new habits and facilities into place. They moved onto cheaper broadband, for example, did a benefits check and planned a budget plan… £150 became an average £825 per person.

People on low incomes cope much better than the rest of us might in their situation.  What we’re doing at Clean Slate is saying that whether or not the individual feels that today is a bigger crisis than yesterday, the intervention we can stage could mean there isn’t one tomorrow. Not only could we stop the revolving door, we might be able to reverse it, so people are thinking ahead and accessing more help to address their health, housing or employment opportunities.

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