The Magic 'Money First' Tree
Original image credit - Towfiqu Barbhuiya
In December 2020, deep into the pandemic and with a Christmas lockdown looming, a community interest company called Clean Slate began a pilot project, helping households experiencing financial hardship to be better off.
At that point, Clean Slate was a small organisation providing money and employment support. And this was a small project - spending up to 12 weeks supporting just 20 people in South East Wales experiencing serious financial hardship.
But Clean Slate’s goal was greater: to trial a ‘Money First’ approach to support for those in hardship - one that looked to treat not the symptoms of poverty, but the cause: a lack of money.
The staff at Clean Slate already had sixteen years of experience of providing practical support to those on small incomes, and it’s money skills initiative, Quids In!, and had a strong working knowledge of what people below the poverty line actually needed. Not only this, but the majority of the support team had lived experience of balancing work and caring responsibilities, or accessing benefits.
“Everyone designing the project suspected, from long experience, that a money first approach would be effective. But still, nobody guessed quite how effective!”
Everyone designing the project suspected, from long experience, that a money first approach would be effective. But still, nobody guessed quite how effective - or that within the year, Clean Slate’s fifteen staff members would become fifty three, that this project would go from supporting 20 people to nearly 1,100 across Wales and England - or that, in the midst of a global pandemic, it would generate over £1.3 million in additional income for some of the most vulnerable households in the UK.
Here is the story of how that ‘Money First’ programme worked, what the outcomes were - and what the lessons it contains for a sector facing a cost-of-living crisis.
How it worked: Money First Support
The starting point for Clean Slate’s programme was one core principle: effective support must first meet practical need, and it must do so quickly and without judgement.
To reflect this, support arrived immediately - with a confirmation text on the day, a call within 3 days, and an appointment within the week.
Next, working remotely by phone and online, staff first completed a financial triage using a digital ‘Money Healthcheck’. This contained 25 non-intrusive questions about the financial facilities and support participants had in place, and covered both practical and emotional issues, all of which spoke not just to a lack of money, but to the underlying problem: a lack of control.
As a first step, the Healthcheck generated an action plan and signposting to a wide range of specialist support around debt, housing and health. This allowed Clean Slate’s staff to target their support, spending every week for the 3 months looking for ways to be better connected and financially better off. Budget planning work broke down overwhelming mountains of bills and demands into manageable tasks, mapping financial problems and pinning down their boundaries. Once that was done, the priority was to use a coaching approach to help people set and move towards their own priorities.
To make long term gains, people needed breathing space, free from the threat of bailiffs, eviction and food poverty. And to have breathing space, they needed money. Immediately. To reflect this, Clean Slate provided supermarket gift vouchers at three points through the programme. These were £85 each (£255 in total) for households with children, £55 each (£185 in total) for child free homes, delivered to the participant within 48 hours of the first appointment (often sooner) by email, or by post, and for a supermarket chosen by them.
What happened next:
Engagement
Firstly, nearly everybody stuck with the programme. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) no ‘mandate’ to attend from the referring agency, over 80% of those who decided to go for that first Money Healthcheck appointment stayed with Clean Slate right to completion.
Growth
Secondly - the pilot grew, rapidly. First to South West Wales, then across North and Mid Wales. Next to East London and Peterborough, and in West London, Essex and North Wales a lighter touch programme was introduced, for those with concerns but not yet in crisis. To reflect this, those programmes were shorter, at 6 weeks, with smaller amounts of ‘breathing space’ vouchers. In fact, a lot of slippage was required between these 6 and 12 week programmes, showing that the line between ‘just about getting by’ and ‘crisis’ is hard to spot by an external referrer - or sometimes by the person themselves.
The Results: Findings from Clean Slate’s Money First Programmes
Escaping the revolving door
Image Ammar Sabaa
The Money Health Check showed huge jumps in having a clear understanding of benefit entitlements (75.8% compared to 18.6% at the start) and knowing how to access specialist help with debt (up to nearly 87% from just a quarter).
It also starkly demonstrated the scale of the food poverty people were facing, even before the cost-of-living crisis had really begun. At the point of referral, 83% of all participants said they would not be able to keep food on the table if their income stopped or decreased for even a few weeks, and even more (85%) were already running out of money for food for at least part of every month. By the end of the programme, this was down to around 50% for both questions - but it demonstrates the huge significance of even a small amount of additional income.
The vouchers reclaimed hours of time usually lost in the revolving door of emergency grant applications - a process that often consumes an entire programme of support - and allowed the focus to shift to sustainable change. And as the other outcomes demonstrate, getting beyond firefighting, and being able to think long term, produces some significant results:
Direct Financial Gains
These gains came from a variety of sources: grants, social tariffs, savings on bills, welfare claims, and finding work or better paid work. We gathered one off and monthly gains, and calculated the total for a one year period for each household. We did not include the outliers who made life changing financial gains, or anything that could not be clearly linked to our own support.
The most significant gains were focused on clearing rent arrears, claiming the correct benefits, and - counter intuitively for many - employment. Even with long experience in employment support, when we began the project, we assumed that looking at work would mostly happen after crisis support, rather than during. Not so. Nearly half of all the financial gains disclosed came from finding better paid work, increasing hours in existing roles, or accessing work for the first time. And of those taking up just two weeks of optional employment support, 40% went on to access paid work.
Overall, the additional income we captured totalled over £1.3 million for 1,099 people: average annual gains of £1,853 per person on the 12 week crisis programme, and £950 for those on the 6 week budgeting programme.
Social outcomes: A shift from crisis to prevention
We knew that there would be other outcomes creating savings for the community as well as the individual. But what emerged was a sense of how wide ranging the impact of supported financial assistance was.
In health, feeling more in control of finances prompted action elsewhere: people needed less emergency medical care and (related) increased attendance at scheduled GP appointments, accessing non crisis mental health support for the first time and - interestingly - smoking reduction and cessation.
And in housing, beyond reducing arrears there was also a marked increase in people accessing specialist housing advice and directly avoiding eviction. This may sound like an isolated issue, but when each eviction costs local authorities at least £24,000, and social landlords are under unprecedented financial pressures themselves, the business case for money focused support starts to look persuasive.
The learning: cost effective support for cost of living
No delays
Any service aimed at supporting someone in a crisis needs to acknowledge that it is just that. As those trying to work out whether to keep the bailiffs at bay before stopping the electricity from being cut off will tell you: everything is now. For those on the brink of homelessness, help that arrives in 6 weeks or 6 months is the same as no help at all. Speed of response is central.
No obstacles
Clean Slate’s vouchers were delivered immediately, by email or in the post for those digitally excluded. Other kinds of targeted financial assistance, like Healthy Start Vouchers and the Energy Support Scheme have struggled with uptake, despite the clear level of need - perhaps because support must be made to fit with the lives of those who need it, not the other way around.
No shame
The taboo that surrounds talking about struggling financially is part of a narrative that blames people for their own poverty - and draws a sharp line between the deserving, and undeserving poor. This well-worn story says that those below the breadline cannot plan, budget or cook properly, are wasteful, and cannot be trusted with extra cash.
Not only is it not true, it is the opposite of what works - and it’s costing us dearly.
Feeling valued as a skilled and independent adult is the only thing that allows people to take action during a crisis - to have the resources to see your GP, to navigate an application for health benefits, or a new job. Anything that strips that away: shame, insecurity, suspicion, penalties, a lack of control - all of these carry compound interest for the public purse. For sustainable progress, we must work to replace an old dynamic (those who give, and those who - gratefully - receive) with a new one: equal exchange.
Money is at the heart of this.
It’s no coincidence that a programme generating financial and health improvements not only tackled immediate needs first, but that it did so without the stigma of food bank queues. No coincidence also that it came without mandates or conditions. (It’s worth noting that Amazon vouchers for any household product were offered alongside supermarket ones. Just two people chose these. Two.)
Image Shane Rounce
It is significant that support came without agenda or judgement. In understanding scarcity, Clean Slate offered an exchange of expertise, not finger wagging about Netflix or takeaways (a tabloid perennial).
And crucially, the help provided was both independent and completely confidential. Effective support relationships must be built on trust, and mutuality. This can only happen when you acknowledge the skills and resilience that have got people this far. This can only happen when you ask people what they need and respect what they say. This can only happen when you take away the immediate pressures of food, light, heat and housing - and then support people to map the problem and make a plan. This can only happen when people have enough money.
Money: The Golden Thread
Many responses to the cost-of-living crisis focus entirely either on personal responsibility or systemic failure (or conflate the two). Looking at social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the only options for low income households are batch cooking lentil bolognese or seizing the means of production. Personally, I like both of these. But if you’re working two jobs to keep the lights on, you’re unlikely to achieve either of them on a Tuesday after the kids are in bed.
With dwindling resources - as individuals and as a sector - we need to find the effective middle ground.
Control over our lives - and necessarily, our money - is the answer. Lack of money is the thread that connects everything currently overwhelming public services, from health to work to raising a family. We know the cost of living crisis raises not just the spectre of mass evictions, but also a health emergency, linking the stresses of debt, poor diet and poor quality housing without heat. The more severe the poverty, and the longer it lasts, the worse the health outcomes. If we’re trying to reduce the cost of poverty to the NHS (and, apparently, we are), it shouldn’t be an eye wateringly difficult decision to - well, reduce the poverty.
If, as it seems, we must think of public spending in terms of efficiencies, this programme demonstrates that investing in those skilled and resilient people on low incomes (even modestly) brings high returns. Supermarket vouchers represented an average of just 10% of the financial gains people went on to make for themselves, through ‘breathing space’ and guidance. Every £1 spent on Clean Slate’s service generated £3 of additional income for vulnerable households. A magic money tree, you might say, but where the magic is the money itself.
To be clear, three £85 supermarket vouchers are nowhere near enough for a family to live on. And three months of ‘bridging’ support requires at least a few functioning services at the end of that bridge. But for those facing deprivation, and the barely coping agencies supporting them, they’re too transformative to ignore.
You don’t have to be a small, agile CIC to move from ideological to evidence-based responses to the cost-of-living crisis. Clean Slate’s innovative, cost-effective programme - with all of its implications for the Basic Income Conversation - was funded by the Department of Work and Pensions.
And they’re not alone: from the Welsh Government to local authorities to the Cash First Leaflets to community clubs, the pandemic has seen the rise of a ‘Money First’ movement that seeks to stop wasting resources on sticking plasters and tackle poverty at source.
There is deep learning here and it is, in essence, this: money changes things. Money. No delay, no strings, no judgement - money.
Direct financial payments that allow everyone to cover their needs, coupled with the right support for those who choose it, is the only way to avoid pouring resources into an ever-deepening black hole. With inflation sitting at 10.7%, child poverty spiralling and one in ten people unable to afford the basics, the UK is about to face the biggest drop in living standards since World War Two.
“Fiddling with Universal Credit rates and short-term fuel support won’t stop Rome from burning - we must be brave enough to rethink our response to poverty entirely. ”
Fiddling with Universal Credit rates and short-term fuel support won’t stop Rome from burning - we must be brave enough to rethink our response to poverty entirely. And not in five years, or two. Right now. It’s now no longer a question of whether we can afford to hand back control to those who need it most. It’s whether we can afford not to.
More about the author
Emma Kernahan - @EmmaKernahan
Writer, activist, optimist. Head of Programmes @OnTheSlate #GoodHelp.
Emma is Head of Programmes at Clean Slate, a CIC helping low income households to be better off. She has a background in support work, focusing on issues relating to employability, housing and homelessness. Emma writes and blogs about the UK benefits system and austerity, and her interests lie in linking effective models of individual support with policy design and delivery.