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Jahanara RajkoomarJahanara is the Director of Customer Services at Gateway Housing Association with a track record of delivering strategic and innovative ...more
Our social purpose and the cost of living crisis
Inflation and the cost of living crisis mean that the tools to help residents in financial trouble are just not working any more, says Jahanara Rajkoomar
There has been much written in recent times about the impact of the cost of living crisis. I don’t want to talk about how bad it is or will be for our residents. We all know, and we don’t want to sit back and let them get on with it. Many housing associations have support services, partnership arrangements with specialist organisations, hardship funds in place, to name a few of the ‘safety’ nets for our residents. A flavour of what we do can be found in a recent showcase of the scale of work we deliver. At Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTVH), at the end of August, we supported 1,500 residents and financial difficulties was the main challenge to work on.
“All the tools and techniques we used before to stabilise finances, be it increasing working hours, reducing expenditure, are not having the same impact”
Yet all of those things are being stretched and residents continue to struggle day to day with financial pressures. A member of my team said to me a few weeks ago that “we are running out of road” for many of the people we support. All the tools and techniques we used before to stabilise finances – be it increasing working hours, reducing expenditure – are not having the same impact. Why? Because the external ‘goal posts’ are shifting almost daily. The cost of simple food items is increasing every day.
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It is demoralising for many of my team. Before the Ukraine war, my team felt empowered to empower our residents because they could use all the tools of the advice trade to make a difference that ‘fixed’ things for many people. Now, for a lot, what we do is a sticking plaster until the external factors settle down (we are eternal optimists).
“Like the optimist I am, I was hoping that the Mini Budget would provide more of that light at the end of the tunnel, but as many economists have already said much better than I can, it was not a Budget for the residents that we are all concerned about”
As a sector, we have many competing priorities: fire/building safety, decarbonisation, building more homes and investing in existing homes, on top of the need to provide good landlord services. And now the uncertainty about the rent settlement puts huge pressure on business plans, or just plans.
So, here’s where I come to why I wanted to write this piece. That sticking plaster for many of the people we work with is the difference between seeing a tiny shaft of light at the end of the tunnel and staying in bed with the curtains drawn (indefinitely). We have many examples of this.
Like the optimist I am, I was hoping that the Mini Budget would provide more of that light at the end of the tunnel, but as many economists have already said much better than I can, it was not a Budget for the residents that we are all concerned about. It is absolutely a reality that many residents will not put their heating on.
“We can’t stabilise household finances for everyone, but the current sticking plaster we can administer can keep our residents a step away from the precipice”
Some will have health conditions and families, and some are older people. We won’t know about all of them or what they are going through. Who knows what that will mean for their well-being by the end of winter. But if the unthinkable did happen to any of our residents in one of our homes, you can bet that some fingers will point towards us.
So, what to do? It’s simple. Let us continue to do what we do. Let’s not forget our social purpose. We are more than the physical homes we provide. During the pandemic, our social purpose drove us to make thousands of calls to ‘vulnerable’ households to check-in to make sure they were OK.
Against the background of aforementioned business challenges, the work that we do to make sure our residents are living as well as possible should not be underestimated. Yes, we can’t stabilise household finances for everyone, but the current sticking plaster we can administer can keep our residents a step away from the precipice. We can’t do everything for everyone. I agree. We can keep doing the things that keep the most impacted with a roof over their heads by staying true to our social purpose. Let us continue to be the helping hand at the individual household level through to community initiatives that give people the hope to carry on.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem If comes to mind as I write this. The world feels mad, bad and ugly right now. But we must and can “keep (y)our head when all about (us) are losing theirs and blaming it on us”.
Jahanara Rajkoomar, director of community investment, Metropolitan Thames Valley
