Q&A: Cost of Living payments of £300 for low-income households

Read the full Q&A here:

How vital is this cost of living payment to struggling households?

These extra payments are absolutely vital to some of the most deprived families and households in our communities.

But what it does is it highlights the chronic underpayment of Universal Credit, not just over the last 12 months but way back since 2016.

There's been some research done recently by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that highlights that 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022. That's almost two and a half times the number of people who are experiencing those same levels of destitution in 2017 and nearly triple the number of children.

And so, though these £300 payments are helpful, and they'll go some way to alleviating the hardship that people are facing, what we see is that it's clearly not enough, and that our most vulnerable families are being chronically under-supported and undervalued by this government.

These payments are available to 8 million of the poorest households including those on universal credit and we know that some families this will just help them scrape by. What can we be doing as a church to offer support?

There's lots of things that we can do as the church and we see churches through our work at Liverpool hosting the Network of Kindness we see churches particularly across Merseyside doing an incredible amount of social action and social justice work in their communities.

We have accessed some figures about the impact that the Church of England is having across Merseyside. We see that 78% of churches are involved in offering some form of social action projects. That could be a food bank, debt advice, or a counselling or befriending service. Churches are doing lots and lots.

We also recognise that churches are doing lots already in their communities, with themselves increasingly reducing resources, whether it is through fewer financial resources or fewer people in their pews who are able and ready to help support people in their communities.

What we are encouraging churches to do through the Network of Kindness is, rather than just start something new—although, if you have the resources, that is a good thing to do, it’s to consider how we can take what we are already doing and add an extra level of support onto it.

So if you're running coffee morning on a Tuesday or whenever, you could turn that into a warm space and you can register online so that people who need somewhere warm to go can find them really easily. If you're running a meal club, you could go from offering a cold lunch to a hot lunch, so people have access to a hot meal.

We're also doing some particular work through the Network of Kindness to equip churches. So, we recognise this is a financial crisis that has impacts on all aspects of people's lives.

And so, we're partnering with the Just Finance Foundation to help people access the Money Help Hub, which is a brilliant tool, brilliant resources, so that our church communities can support people to know how to manage their finances as well as they possibly can.

And we have to be realistic, because the level of Universal Credit is already too low before this extra payment, it's not just a case of managing our money better. People will still be left short, but we can help people to make the best of the limited resources that they've got.

Over the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, churches have repeatedly stepped up to serve the community, as you've mentioned, do we need to be making sure that we continue to shine a light of Jesus through our communities and our work?

Absolutely. Our work for justice in our communities is a core expression of our discipleship and what it means for us to be faithful followers of Jesus. And as we've already discussed, churches are doing lots and lots of things. But when a crisis reaches this level, we need to go beyond just doing things to speaking out and calling for systemic change.

And so at Together Liverpool, we would encourage people to think about what are the ways that they can make their voices heard to call for real substantial change, is a good way that we can shine a light and express our faith?

You know, we see Jesus time and time again not just do kind things but challenge unjust structures and speak truth to power. We would encourage people to get involved with two campaigns in particular:

The first is the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Guarantee Our Essentials campaign. They have teamed up with the Trussell Trust and they are calling for a significant increase in Universal Credit levels.

At the moment, a single person receives £85 a week. They recognise that that is insufficient for people to have all the things that they need to flourish, so they are calling for an increase to £120 a week.

For families, they are calling for an increase from £134 a week to £200 for a couple.

That is just about enough to help people have access to everything that they need. So, churches can throw the weight behind that campaign.

We're also working with the Joint Public Issues Team and Christians Against Poverty to push forward with a Let's End Poverty campaign, which is about much more broadly bringing together faith communities to make sure that issues of poverty and social injustice are on the political agenda as we come into an election year. It's always good for us to speak out, but particularly when we have the opportunity to elect a new government, it's really important that we're making our voices heard and we're campaigning for justice well. T

This November, Together Liverpool, are holding a Network of Kindness Cost of Living Assembly. Can you tell us more about that?

Absolutely. It's the third one in a series that we've run where we bring together people who are involved in social action, social justice from across Merseyside to think together about how we can support people as they experience this ongoing cost of living crisis.

We're starting to do just what we've talked about today, which is move people from thinking about what can we do to help alleviate poverty in our communities, how can we, as we do that, speak for justice and campaign.

So we're really pleased that the Let's End Poverty campaign team are going to be joining us for that online session and they're going to be explaining to us a little bit about where the campaigns come from and how churches and faith groups can get involved and we would love - It's particularly targeted at people in Merseyside but it's open and accessible to everyone wherever they're listening to us from today. The session is going to be on the 16th of November. It's happening online and it's running from 7pm to 8.30pm.

Finally, tell us a little bit about how the Network of Kindness initiative has impacted people?

The Network of Kindness came about because we recognized that there were lots of people doing really incredible work in their communities, but there's strength when we come together as a collective and as a whole group of people, isn't there? And so what we do is we bring people together from across Merseyside to build relationships, so that we're not just working on our own in isolation in our communities, but we're connecting with each other, we're sharing the things that we're learning.

So different people have different expertise and insights from their communities, and we want them to share them for the benefit of others. And then over time, we're building this campaigning voice where we start to speak for justice. And so through that network of kindness we are doing those three things, we are building relationships, we are sharing what we are learning, we are campaigning for justice but we also do some things to very particularly resource people as part of the network of kindness so we have some money that we are able to offer groups to work to combat holiday hunger, we connect them to funding sources and there are particular training opportunities that we can invite people into because we're growing a network that can draw in a substantial number of people.