If you find it hard to talk about money, you’re not alone. That’s why every year we encourage people to open up about their finances. By having a conversation, you can improve your physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
Our Welfare & Benefits and Tenancy Sustainment teams signpost customers to get additional support around money management. In 2021 our Tenancy Sustainment team supported 543 new customers in the first year of tenancy and 93 customers at risk of losing their tenancy. Of those, we signposted over 220 people and families for help with items such as:
- Mattresses and bedding
- Furniture and white goods
- Food and fuel vouchers
- Clothing (and school uniform)
- Pots, pans and cutlery
- DHP/ DLA/ Council tax and PIP awards
- Curtains and carpets
- Recycling bins
- Food
- WaterSure and Warm Home Discounts
This totalled £50,330 in items and awards, and some also benefitting from having a weekly gain in their income.
Here’s just some of the ways our Income teams in the East and the West helped customers maximise their income last year.
- A successful appeal made by one of our Welfare Benefits Officers to reopen a claim for housing benefit that a local authority had previously closed. This resulted in a backdated award of over £5,000, meaning our customer to pay his rent arrears and gave him peace of mind that he would be able to pay his rent in the future.
- We had a customer made redundant during the pandemic, and later became very unwell. Her daughter had to give up work to become her full-time carer. She had made a claim for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) which was rejected. One of the team successfully challenged this decision and helped her daughter make a claim for carer’s allowance. Both of these appeals were successful and resulted in a large increase to the household income.
- Another customer’s mental health had deteriorated after the death of her mother. She was an alcoholic, had issues with hoarding, and had lost her job. Our teams helped her to make a claim for Universal Credit and look for a smaller, more manageable, property for her to move to. With support from both us and her family, she moved to a more suitable home which she could manage both financially and physically.
- When another PIP application was turned down, a member of the team stepped in to help a customer. She appealed the decision at tribunal, where the original decision was overturned, and our customer was awarded over £15,000 in backdated payments that they’d always been entitled to.
- An elderly customer had an unclaimed pension which stopped both his housing benefit and pension credit. We spent a lot of time helping this customer track down his lost pension. Thanks to our help, housing benefit has been reinstated, as has pension credit and he was able to take the unclaimed pension as a lump sum of £5,000.
- We supported a customer to access the Warm Home Discount from her energy supplier, which gave her a £140 credit on her electricity bill due to being on a low income.
Backed by the government, www.moneyhelper.org.uk offers advice around benefits, savings and money troubles, and how you can get help if you’re worried about any of these things.
Building money conversations into our everyday lives also helps us build financial confidence and resilience to face whatever the future throws at us.