Residents of Lambeth and Southwark to receive more support for long-term health conditions and financial problems
By Damon Gibbons, Executive Director, Centre for Responsible Credit
The Financial Shield pilot has secured funding to continue helping residents in Lambeth and Southwark through to the end of March 2023. The extension from funder Impact on Urban Health comes as we have seen increased take-up of support in recent weeks, and as interest in participating in the project is growing amongst more GP practices in the area.
In the past week alone, we have received appointment requests from just over fifty residents, with the majority (80%) of these requests coming from BAME backgrounds.
Time and again, residents are reporting significant problems with paying for rent, Council Tax, and affording essentials, including food. They are also struggling with a wide range of health problems, with a particularly high prevalence of poor mental health.
Increasingly, income maximisation alone is not sufficient for many residents to be able to afford a reasonable standard of living or get out of the debts that they have accrued in recent years. Our teams report an increasing number of residents with ‘negative budgets’ even after all benefit entitlements have been obtained. We are fortunate, in that some of the participating creditors in Financial Shield, have shown a willingness to respond to this with discretionary payments to help clear historic arrears. We will therefore be working with them and our project evaluators to examine the role that ‘debt-relief’ can play in helping to improve health outcomes through to the end of next March.
As the blogs from our Back on Track team workers indicate, these problems are not solely due to the recent ‘cost-of-living crisis’ – although this has undoubtedly increased the financial pressures many are facing. The project is also seeing the effects of problems which extend much further back. For example, one recent appointment request came from a woman unable to work for over a year since her diagnosis of breast cancer. Another from a resident who has built up over £20,000 of Council Tax debt, despite being in full-time employment.
There are often complex reasons for the financial problems that people are facing.
In many cases, the true complexity of a person’s problem is only revealed over time as a relationship of trust is built between the project workers and the resident. The blogs from our front-line include references to financial abuse within households, and to other complex issues which take a relationship of trust for people to disclose. Seeing a person face-to-face is often key to this.
And the demand for face-to-face support is high. Around half of all appointment requests made in the past two weeks have been for face-to-face appointments, even though the initial request for an appointment is submitted by residents through our website. As we have noted previously, many people can undertake basic customer journeys through digital channels, but ultimately need to be seen face-to-face before their problems can be fully understood and addressed.
As commissioners of support services are increasingly seeking to ‘channel shift’ from local community-based support into digital provision, there is a clear risk that many vulnerable residents will struggle to find the help they need to deal with their problems, and that health outcomes will suffer as a result.
If Financial Shield is successful, then it will be because it has established a business case and potential funding model to support the provision of continued community-based services.