Cost of living crisis – People’s options are very limited
Sinead O'Connor, Manager, Cheetham Hill Advice Centre
I work at Cheetham Hill Advice Centre and we are seeing people's incomes squeezed like never before. The community in Cheetham is resilient in ways many communities don't need to be and there is a creativity and strength to how people manage their money and their household budgets.
However, we are seeing a volume of financial struggle that is deeper than we have seen in the past. People come to us with not enough money to live on, housing inadequate and debt high. The people in our community exhausted any financial cushion they had somewhere between the first lockdown and the second one (or what we in Manchester called 2020).
The simple fact is that the cost of barely surviving is now outstripping people's incomes and this is impacting an already large and growing number of people locally. There is no clever maths, no secret way to stretch your ingredients and no way to afford the basic essentials in life. We know that people are making impossible decisions and are giving up most forms of comfort - having long given up any notion of an occasional luxury.
So what do we do at CHAC? First, we make sure people have every penny of tax credits and welfare benefits that they are entitled to. This includes payments towards additional costs people face if they are Disabled or living with long term health conditions. We make sure people are in housing that meets their needs and is as affordable as possible. We also make sure people are debt free, or have as sustainable a debt as possible.
Make no bones about this - people's options are very limited. However, we can at least make sure that we have factored in all relevant issues and then make sure people understand the consequences of different courses of action. This may include explaining that people may face homelessness if they don't pay the rent, whilst also understanding that if their car gets repossessed then they may not be able to get to work. We also ensure that lenders and landlords do not over step what they are legally allowed to do.
This is a critical part of our work as without free services like CHAC, many people would not be able to afford representation to attain their rights, leading to greater inequality. It would also mean that people would be swept away by poverty in situations that can be improved and sometimes prevented.
If you looked through the window at CHAC you would see forms being filled in, phone calls being made, on-line processes being completed and lots and lots of listening and talking. These are simple tools but at the moment, we are able to momentarily hold back the tide of the cost of living crisis - only for a bit, but long enough to help people keep their heads above water.
For more information, visit https://cheethamadvice.org.uk/
