David Hilferty on looking past the pieces and seeing the whole
A couple of weeks ago I caught a bit of Newsnight. For context, I’ve got a three-year-old and a thirteen-month-old – so if I’m lucky (and on a good night) there’s about a 15-minute window to let my hair down at the end of the evening. And that’s what I was doing with it. But anyway. I was thrown back by one question from the interviewer: “are we seeing a new cost of living crisis?”
It’s hard to know where to start with that one. Because – as we in the Citizens Advice network can attest – the cost of living crisis we’ve been experiencing for years isn’t over. And it also wasn’t very new for lots of people.
What the cost of living crisis did – and is doing – is entrench and exacerbate existing inequality.
Yet what tends to happen is that the media, policymakers and governments get stuck in an endless run of individual moments.
For a week at the end of July it was food inflation.
A week later that had seemingly been forgotten because Ofgem had announced their new energy price cap.
Then the following week the Scottish Government announced its Housing Emergency Action Plan and suddenly the story was all about the housing crisis.
You see what I mean? Moment followed by moment followed by moment. It’s all a bit overwhelming and it limits the bandwidth available to focus on the bigger picture.
And before anyone else says it, I freely admit that we at CAS – and perhaps other charities too – can sometimes fall into the trap of playing the moments game. Every week for example we are invited to write 500 words about whatever subject we like, and most weeks we do so by focusing on the immediate crisis – housing, energy bills, social security. It’s hard not to – particularly when we have solutions to suggest.
But of course none of these are isolated moments. Rather, they all amount to a cumulative and compounding impact – and cumulative and compounding harm.
To a household that’s struggling, these are not separate moments but interdependent long-term experiences of your everyday life. When you can’t pay your rent, you typically can’t afford to put food on the table either, or pay your energy bill or council tax or buy new clothes. These aren’t isolated issues but interlocking parts of dysfunctional systems.
What we need to do – all of us – is get better at seeing the whole picture. Where problems and issues overlap and interconnect. And where solutions need to be comprehensive and systemic to match that.
So no, we’re not facing a ‘new’ cost of living crisis. Just the same one we’ve been living through for years – with all of its intersected harms.
What we need now is joined-up thinking to tackle these joined-up problems with genuine long-term and creative solutions.
To realise that, two things to happen. First, people in the most complex circumstances must be able to access essential support where and when they need it most. And second, greater emphasis must be directed toward prevention and tackling the systemic problems people face.
Anything less would be to continue the toleration of harm.
David Hilferty is director of impact at Citizens Advice Scotland.
This column was first published in the Herald.
