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Housing Association to use soap opera to tell residents about welfare reforms
Gedling Homes, based in Nottingham, is hosting a ‘soap opera’ to help tell tenants about important changes to their welfare benefits. It will run a series of plays called Confusion Street with actors performing scenes to show tenants the impact the changes will have on real-life people like them. They have worked with tenants and drama-based training group ‘AFTA Thought’ to put on the plays and, through the power of drama it hopes local people will better understand how the Government’s benefits cuts will affect them. The theatre group will act out scenes to explain the different cuts including the spare bedroom tax. Actors will also perform scenes around moving to a smaller home, lodging and the impact of other benefit caps and changes.
Gedling Homes has a dedicated Money Wise Team to give help and advice to tenants around changes to their benefits and staff will be on hand to talk to tenants at the soap opera event. Tenants will also be able to find out more about swapping their home with other tenants and what properties are available for exchange. Lynn Clayton, Gedling Homes Managing Director said: “The changes to welfare benefits will affect many working people as well as vulnerable tenants who will struggle to make ends meet. In particular where working age tenants have a spare bedroom, they are likely to see a significant cut in their housing benefit.
“Unfortunately there aren’t enough smaller homes to move people to and for those that can’t or don’t want to move, we are doing everything we can to help them manage their money to lessen the impact of the new ‘Bedroom Tax’ rules. Our soap opera event is something different to help inform as many tenants as possible about the changes that are going to affect them and it’s a chance for them to see some real-life scenarios and talk to someone to get advice and support.”
For more details, see Gedling Homes to host ‘soap opera’ about benefit changes
Its sad (and a tad patronising to claimants) that they find the need to communicate with people in this fashion.
The reality though is that many people simply do not read their letters. Not interested.
I have lost count of the number of IB—> ESA claimants who are staggered when they get a work focussed interview and tell me they arent going “cos im on the sick”
They never read their letter informing them of thier WRAG responsibilities. Straight in the bin. Dont matter. Not important. Not interested
I find it staggering that people do not attach importance to stuff that directly affects their day to day lives. I still get clients who havent heard of the bedroom tax, despite leaflet drops and constant TV stuff.
I wonder how many will throw their new council tax bills in the bin, saying it doesnt apply to them.
Gonna be a busy spring and summer folks!
I never fail to be amazed at the number of people who:
are too busy/not bothered to go to the hearing for a Council Tax liability order;
are too lazy/not bothered to go to possession proceedings at the County Court;
are too lazy/not bothered to turn up for an emergency appointment made for them at CAB with great difficulty because they have bailiffs practically on the doorstep, and not even to tell us that they aren’t coming, and then
expect another food parcel.
Not all clients are blameless victims of the system. Some do not seem to want to help themselves.
But of course that’s why they are in the problems they are in. Yonks ago, when I was in CAB in the early 1980s, I was faced with an adviser who was bemoaning her inability to like her nasty, rude, feckless clients and thus behave “impartially” to them. I said we don’t have to like them, just do what we can to help them, and to remember that many of them are in trouble precisely becasue they are not very nice to other people.
It is very frustrating when clients don’t cooperate with the advice or litigation process and it wastes resources which could have been used to help others.
That said, taking an objective stance:
1. Clients are frequently very poorly informed about the law and its remedies and fail to understand how important it is to turn up. That said, it’s not just clients. Last week I had to advise a solicitor to get their client to tick the box for an oral hearing before a FTT on an Enquiry Form because the solicitor did not appreciate the importance of attending and the difference it can make.
2. Clients very often feel powerless and fatalistic. They can have little confidence in the courts/Tribunals system and feel intimidated by and alienated from the process. This is particularly so if they have had a bad experience in the past or are unfamiliar with Tribunals/Courts.
3. Some clients are positively frightened of the benefits system and the people who administer it.
4. Many clients feel intimidated by the law and lawyers, very aware of the class/status differences and are embarrassed to be having to claim benefits/be in debt. Use of complex, legalistic language peppered with Latin, big textbooks and cross-dressing in 18th century men’s clothing in some courts, don’t help this perception.
5. Research shows that there are widespread levels of low level depression and anxiety among claimants. Dealing with the benefits system is stressful and frustrating (even for those of us who do it for a living!). Some benefits officials really do behave in a way which demeans and disempowers their “customers” and some do it deliberately. Stress makes all of us do irrational, regrettable things and depression creates a cycle of negative thinking which can lead to clients being fatalistic and “not bothering”.
The NHS has made major reductions in “Did Not Attend” rates by reminding people by phoning and texting about appointments. Perhaps HMCTS could take a leaf out of their book.
Not all of them, and I was quoting my colleague. She was a nice middle-clsss volunteer spinster in her 70s who once had a client she couldn’t get the hang of - he seemed unable to explain what he wanted. The manager discovered that he was masturbating under the table and had come in because he got off on grey-haired older women. I’m sure all advice agencies have had the occasional client who you have had to bar because of unacceptable behaviour, not just this but threatening violence and extreme verbal abuse. Volunteers cannot be expected to put up with that sort of thing.
I agree (I’ve also been in this game for 20+ years).
In addition, many of our clients have so many different agencies to deal with that I think it all blurs into one. I’ve said many times that being poor and reliant upon benefits is a full-time job in terms of the hoops that have to be jumped through and when you add a dollop of health issues (especially anxiety/depression), language difficulties, a learning difficulty or just a chaotic lifestyle and a lack of basic education you’ve got the perfect ingredients for a client who doesn’t engage well. It’s all too easy to do a Daily Mail and paint them all as feckless, lazy ‘skivers’.
The clients I’ve tended to struggle with over the years are the ‘prized middle-class’ ones who have fallen on hard times and who believe they are special cases, that the rules can’t possibly apply to them and that I should be offering them a preferential service. They can be far more difficult to deal with in my experience.
I actually think the soap opera is a good idea to bring home the consequences of non payment of rent as its not to everyone’s ‘taste’ to read the Guardian and a mixed approach to education can only be a good thing.
However ‘not thinking of consequences’ is not exclusively a failing of some clients: it is also our failing if we talk to people in such a way that they go away resolved to never engage with us again.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on both of these points.
Could I ask people to please show some decorum in terms of the language being used about the people we work with and their behaviour? The language of stigma and stereotyping benefit claimants is already bad enough, without advisers carelessly reinforcing those images.
I also think that the “soap opera” idea is a good one too. Here in Warwickshire as part of our Financial Inclusion Partnership, we are producing a series of “Welfare Reform films”, which are short public information films on various aspects of welfare reform and financial inclusion. The film currently in production is about the new Council tax Support Scheme and we have got an agreement in principle for the link to the film to be included in all District and Borough Council’s Council Tax bills.
One of the local CAB’s is producing the films, which have been commissioned by the County Council. The first film is about the HB changes and can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP4ThvRUx2E
The idea is that the films will be played in Local Council waiting areas, community hubs etc; advice agency waiting rooms and links to the film have been sent out to all Elected Members in the county in order to raise awareness of the main changes. The big problem at the moment, as I’m sure a lot of you will have experienced, is that clients are just not engaging with Local Authorities in particular, regarding the welfare reform changes and I guess a lot of it is about the sheer volume of chages that some people are just finding it hard to get their head around and as a result are probably just ignoring official correspondence.
Trying to engage with people in an alternative way, using different mediums can only be a good thing if it gets the message across, as current methods are clearly failing.