PRAN NEWSLETTER ISSUE 2: September 2023
Autumn Edition
Dear Pran Members
Since starting PRAN in June 2023, we have been planning our initial steps and activities. This issue provides an overview of existing activity with details of our October Workshop and forthcoming Autumn podcast! It also features excellent contributions from our members: End Furniture Poverty, Citizens Advice Bureau Blackpool, and WODIN. In solidarity, Natalija and Vicki.
PRAN WORKSHOP
Building Partnerships and Collaborations in a Context of Crisis
Wednesday 18th of October, 2023, 12 - 4 pm. Liverpool Hope Creative Campus.
Guest Speakers:
Daniel Oliver, Head of Programmes, Greater Manchester Poverty Action (GMPA)
Dr Susanne Martikke, Researcher, Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations (GMCVO)
Liz Reed and Dr James Organ, Liverpool Access to Advice Network (LATAN)
Ruth Hannan, Director, People’s Powerhouse
Andrew Grinnell, Co-Director, Poverty Truth Network
Jonathon Prasad, Poverty Researcher, Global Race Centre for Equality
Please follow us on our newly launched account: @PRAN_Action
A PLACE TO CALL HOME
By Claire Donovan, Head of Policy, Research & Campaigns, End Furniture Poverty
Living without essential furniture items can have a devastating impact on your life. End Furniture Poverty’s latest research shows that 9% of the UK population (6 million people) live in furniture poverty. This means they lack at least one essential furniture item or appliance. These include cookers, fridges, fridges, sofas, beds, a freezer, a washing machine, a dining table, or bedroom storage. In some cases, people have no flooring or window coverings - and 1 million live in deep furniture poverty - without three or more essential items.
Furniture poverty is poverty, when people don’t have enough money to meet their basic needs. A decade of austerity, followed by the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis has made it much harder for many people to do that. Furniture and domestic appliances are expensive, so when people cannot afford food, it’s even less likely that they can afford to replace a broken cooker.
Our research also showed that 7 out of 10 people living in furniture poverty had problems sleeping, and the same number of those living with long-term conditions or disabilities said it made their condition worse. While 9 out of 10 said they felt stressed or anxious living without items.
There is a real stigma attached to furniture poverty so many people turn to high-cost credit to acquire items, which can lead to unmanageable debt. Our research showed that 7 out of 10 feel ashamed or embarrassed by their home, which can also lead to social isolation and mental health problems.
The main routes of support for people living in furniture poverty are through local welfare assistance providers; usually crisis schemes delivered through local authorities, furniture provision in the social housing sector, grants from funders, and furniture reuse.
Our report (No Place Like Home) reveals that only 2% of social housing is let as furnished compared to 29% in the private rental sector. We followed that with our Blueprint for Furniture Provision in Social Housing publication to help landlords understand how furnished tenancies work and how to introduce a successful scheme for their tenants.
Our research has also revealed that 35 English local authorities no longer operate a local welfare scheme, leaving over 14m people without access to crisis support. Resetting Crisis Support our next report, is published in the autumn and will include updated figures. While the introduction of the Household Support Fund has been a positive development, the short-term nature of the funding leaves many fearing for the future of crisis support, so we continue to lobby the Government for long-term, ring-fenced funding for local welfare schemes.
Social housing tenants are far more likely to be living in furniture poverty - 26% of social housing tenants live in furniture poverty. Of the 1.2m living without flooring in the UK, 61% live in social housing.
This will be partly due to the socioeconomic background of social housing tenants, but we believe landlords can and should, do more to support their tenants.
Change is on the horizon. Partly as a consequence of our work, all private and social landlords in Wales will be required to install flooring in all habitable rooms and have until 2030 to achieve this – consultation for the equivalent legislation in England is now underway.
Here in Liverpool, work has begun to bring partners together from the local authority, the social housing sector, and crucially public health, to set a clear target for furniture provision. A housing summit in September, convened by Liverpool City Council, welcomed all of the city’s social housing chief executives and asked them to commit to furnishing at least 10% of their stock.
We believe this is a realistic and achievable target that begins to meet the demand and hope to use the example of Liverpool as a template for other local partnerships to replicate.
Although End Furniture Poverty is a national campaign, our local work includes Time for Bed, a fundraising appeal to offer free beds to children in the Liverpool city region. Our research shows that 18,000 children in Merseyside live without their own beds. Some share with siblings or other family members, while others sleep on sofas or even the floor. None of these children will get a decent night’s sleep, which will seriously affect their well-being and life chances. When we opened for referrals just before the summer school holidays, we immediately gave away beds to 27 children. We continue to fundraise and welcome donations or links to businesses and high-net-worth individuals!
There is so much work to do and a long road ahead, but we strongly believe partnership working is the key to success. Networks like PRAN help to bring us together, so we can share best practices, gain inspiration and support, and enable us to shout louder with a shared voice. The cost of living crisis is here for the foreseeable future, so now is the time for change. Together we can End Furniture Poverty.
THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVED EXPERIENCE: OUR APPROACH AT CITIZENS ADVICE BLACKPOOL
By Conal Land (Generalist Adviser and Research & Campaigns Officer), Helen Gwilliam (Research and Campaigns Assistant) and Tracy Hopkins (Chief Executive Officer, Citizens Advice Blackpool).
As an organisation interested in alleviating poverty, lived experience sits at the core of our philosophy and work, but the term, and how it is integrated into practice and policy, lacks standardisation. It can therefore be difficult to argue for changes to services and policies based on lived experience even when its value has been identified.
In Blackpool poverty is a long-term problem. It includes 8 out of the 10 most deprived Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in England and has the lowest life and healthy life, expectancies for men and women in England.
Blackpool and the surrounding area also feature high levels of health inequality internally. Residents in the most affluent wards are expected to live over a decade longer than those in the most deprived wards.
What Blackpool does have is a strong history of coproduction. As the focus within research and healthcare has shifted towards the challenges coastal communities face, and to understand the wider social determinants of poor health and poverty, Blackpool has been ready to answer that research call.
There has been a surge of coproduction and codesign based on lived experience. Citizens Advice has a strong history of using clients’ stories to influence service provision and policy at both local and national levels. To continue this work, we seek to embed lived experience more firmly into our practice and to build stronger links with our community so that people with lived experience feel safe, empowered and valued when they share their stories.
The foundation for this has been to develop our understanding of how it feels to share lived experiences during recent projects run in conjunction with the National Institute of Health Care and Research (NIHR) and NHS England. Put simply, people have told us they feel unheard and are unsure of the motives of researchers and how their personal stories will be used. Consequently, the challenges for Lived Experience as a concept come from two angles.
From a practitioner's perspective, how do we gather, analyse and present lived experience in a way that communicates its potential? Most of us speak regularly about its importance. But the question is, are we maximising its impact and ensuring the continued engagement of those who provide us with their valuable expertise?
This is a question we ask ourselves at Citizens Advice Blackpool. We believe that documenting our journey to embed lived experience thoroughly and to maximise its impact from the start, will help us and others, to learn from our work. We are establishing a Lived Experience Hub with frank honesty about the challenges we face, and the successes we experience that can inspire trust in the process.
From the perspective of those with lived experience, we ask how can we gain, engage and maintain trusted relationships with people whose experiences are so valuable. After our conversations, we believe that, in Blackpool, we must be seen as a trusted organisation. We aim to treat all those with lived experience as the experts they are, approaching this journey with honesty and openness so that those who trust us to share their stories see the work we do alongside them and how much their input is valued.
NEW PROJECT: UTOPIAN MEALS
By Sylvia Kalungi (CEO & Projects Lead - WODIN)
The Women and Digital Inclusion (WODIN) Utopian Meals Project - UMEP - is a culturally appropriate food parcels project that has been funded by The National Lottery Community Fund and all the Lottery players. We thank them for their support.
UMEP is a cultural ethnic foodbank in Liverpool providing families with staple foods to complement other food banks. WODIN is embedded within black/African communities in Liverpool and virtually, to keep them connected and reduce the isolation that has been exacerbated by the COVID lockdowns and now, the cost-of-living crisis.
UMEP will provide Up to 30 different women/families from Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Rwanda, Cameroon, Congo & other nationalities with local food parcels each month for 5 months. Many of these women are on a low income, asylum seekers, refugees, jobless, elderly or isolated.
With the cost of living crisis that came so soon after the global lockdowns, black women and their families in Liverpool have had to make tough choices between heating and eating; paying other bills, and putting food on the table. Many are low-income earners or with no jobs and are finding it difficult to feed their families. This project aims to reduce food poverty in the black communities in Liverpool Merseyside.
Next issue: PRAN’s newsletter will be released quarterly with the next issue coming out in February 2024.
Call for contributions: If you would like your story to be featured in our next newsletter, please contact us.
