The Government announced cuts
in the welfare budget amounting to £11billion shortly after the elections in
2010. Later that year, they announced a further £6billion on top of that. The
effect in Dundee is that by the time the changes are all rolled out over the
next two or three years, benefit claimants in Dundee will have lost
approximately £27.5million per annum. That’s money out of the pockets of the
poorest and most vulnerable in Dundee and further cuts are planned.
Alongside these cuts, the
Government is introducing a Universal Credit (UC), merging Working Tax Credit,
Income Support, income based Job Seekers Allowance, income related Employment
Support Allowance, and Hosing Benefit. UC will be paid in one monthly payment
to one individual in a household, and will no longer include enough to cover
all housing costs, even for those formerly in receipt of full Housing Benefit.
It will present a serious budgeting challenge for people not used to handling
one large benefit payment across all household expenses for the month. It is
predicted that large numbers of UC recipients will struggle to manage household
expenses. Dundee City Council has set up a Welfare Reforms Working Group to
assess and plan for the impacts of the reforms on both Council services and its
customers. Amongst other things, it is expected that there will be a huge
increase in numbers of people seeking help and advice from the Council and its
partners in the voluntary sector, and a key element of the Council’s strategy is
development of an early intervention model for advice.
At present, experience shows
that all too often, when people get into financial difficulties, they put off
seeking expert advice for too long. They’ll rob Peter to pay Paul, muddle
through, put their heads in the sand and hope the problem will go away. By the
time they realise it won’t, the problem has escalated into something
multi-faceted and complex which needs what is known as a crisis intervention,
needing several appointments and hours of the adviser’s time to sort things out.
With pressure on budgets and staff resources, while demand for help rises
dramatically, the only thing to do is look for ways of working smarter, finding
ways of supporting the same staff to deal with more clients in the time
available – hence the early intervention model.
Front-line Council staff
meets with the public in many ways in the course of delivering a wide range of
services. Where references is made to
financial or benefit problems front-line staff are being trained and encouraged
to ask if it might be useful to get advice with an expert adviser within the
Council or one of its voluntary sector partners. These expert advisers can
carry out an income maximisation check to see if they might be entitled to more
or different benefits, or they might be able to negotiate with creditors to
reschedule debt and reduce monthly outgoings. They can even help with advice on
energy costs to possibly reduce these ever rising fuel bills. If this can be
done at the earliest possible stage, before problems become deep-rooted and
complex, the time spent by advice staff can be shortened, allowing more people
to be seen. This is just one of what will become a raft of strategies to mitigate
the effects of the changes in the pipeline.
Derek Miller, Financial Inclusion Development Officer,
Dundee City Council
Information on financial
inclusion services in Dundee can be found at the Dundee City Council website. The Council’s duty line for money advice and debt
counselling is 431167 and
it is open from Monday to Friday between 9.30am to 4.30 p.m.
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