Welfare Rights in the age of Coronavirus

I got this text over the weekend from a local decorator – over the years he has become a friend – he knows I am using this.

“Mark, I’m getting grief from family that i shouldn’t be going to work. Watching the news everything is getting really heavy now and im starting to cave. There is also the worry about getting materials as things progress – shop closures etc. Being self employed i get zip from the gov. They say universal credit, £90 @ week, is being made available but after 3 hours sat staring at the gov website and endless clicking, i have given up. They make it so infuriatingly difficult to claim. Bastards!”

Last week we made the decision to close all our offices and move Citizens Advice Sheffield – one of the largest Citizens Advice Services in England onto phone and digital. This meant  moving our 170 staff and 140 volunteers to home working. From Monday the 23rd of March we will be providing a beefed up telephone and web service. We hope that this will not only mean that we can provide a safe, accessible and resilient service but that we will also be better placed to meet greater demand. We normally help about 2,000 people a month – we hope that by providing a telephone and web service we can increase this to significantly if we need to.

Why we changed our operating model

First, as the prevalence of Corona Virus increases we could see that more and more people would be moving to self isolation. We know that businesses are closing, people are being made redundant or are facing reductions in income due to sick pay, no sick pay, or loss of income if they are self employed and horrifyingly in some cases being evicted.

This combination of factors means that people are likely to need advice with regard to employment rights, welfare rights and probably other areas such as housing and utilities but will be very reluctant to sit in waiting rooms waiting to be seen. Many will not have ever used the benefits system or will not have used it recently.

The second reason is of course because we need to ensure that our staff and volunteers are safe, so getting them to work from home and still be paid was very important to us. Of course we also hope that this will help us to continue to provide a resilient service to help those in real need over the coming months.

Health and Money

Quite rightly the focus to date has been about the health risks of COVID-19, however, as the government has begun to recognise on the 20th of March the financial impact of this virus is also tremendously important – not just to the economy but also to individuals.

For some of the most financially vulnerable they not only face a loss of income for themselves – but for their families – this at a time when children are no longer going to school and older ones will have little opportunity to work. It feels like a recipe for stress, anxiety and disorder.

Strategic Leadership at Place level

While for understandable reasons the emphasis at the moment is on the health system and to a degree on support to the vulnerable – in particular the elderly, the scale of the crisis means that government actions are having a fundamental effect on wider society.

What we do to respond to the needs of people on low income and in insecure employment will affect the effectiveness of strategies to reduce social contact. We need to quickly consider whether Local Resilience Forums should involve key frontline VCS services such as welfare rights organisations.

What do you think?