Laura Plumb from Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council on Tory plans to axe benefits from the obese and addicted - and why a new approach is needed
The impact of future cuts to benefits across the board cannot be underestimated – they will impact services to all of us but the biggest impacts will be individuals and most of all those who can least weather a reduction in income financially or in terms of wellbeing.
Stigma is still rife in our society in many forms and perhaps most of all with regard to those with low income and struggling to survive on benefits – many references have been made over recent years to a return to a Dickensian era and mention of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor has become more commonplace.
Thelatest attack on those with “self-inflicted” conditions brings this into sharp relief. Cutting benefits to obese people or those with addictions will do nothing to resolve their problems but only accentuate them and be divisive to society.
What is striking about the latest announcements as outlined in a recent TFN article is that the stated intention is to save money to taxpayers.
However, this is more short term thinking – making people’s difficult lives even harder will lead to an increase in costs across the board: in dealing with crisis situations such as evictions, mental health crises, increased offending, the list goes on…
making people’s difficult lives even harder will lead to an increase in costs across the board
Laura Plumb, EVOC
The Edinburgh-based Recovery Essentials Project, hosted by Edinburgh Voluntary Organisations Council (EVOC) as a collaborative, is a welfare rights and financial inclusion service based in drug and alcohol agencies.
We and our partners have noted that integrating this service with those providing treatment has a number of advantages – not least the fact that having an adviser on site means the referral for advice is much more likely to bear fruit.
We have achieved some fantastic financial gains for our clients but the project is about more than hard cash.
We are dealing with vulnerable people with chaotic lifestyles who find the maze of the benefits system hostile and virtually impossible to navigate.
Our team approach is to support clients through their experience (by texting reminders, accompanying them to appointments etc). This person-centred approach assists clients to build confidence and self-esteem in relationships of trust with the adviser which lead to better engagement and consequently better outcomes. The value of this approach cannot be underestimated.
As a result of the help received clients have not only a more stable financial base as well as a more stable emotional base that enables them to better engage with the therapeutic work and treatment programmes provided by the host agencies who are now able work more easily with their clients to focus directly on the addiction work they are trained to provide.
Our next step is to embark on a research project to evidence the cost-effectiveness of our approach. The research and evaluation will analyse the effectiveness of the innovative holistic interventions by Recovery Essentials and also provide a Social Return On Investment (SROI) impact assessment.
We expect to highlight the benefits of an embedded and person-centred approach in terms of providing sustainable solutions for long term wellbeing and resilience of clients and to avoid repeating cycles and ongoing costs to us all as a result of repeated presentations to housing, health and other services.
Access to adequate benefits paid without labyrinthine processes and without extra spoonfuls of stigma would improve everyone’s lives, speed up people’s recovery from whatever disadvantage they face and reduce costs to numerous services.
