Welfare Reforms - time for action

In my last post, I talked about the huge impact of the welfare reforms on Wolverhampton’s citizens. We have partnered with our Council and other key players to provide a full impact assessment. This will tell us the financial impact on the City, which is in the many £10s of millions, and drill down to street and household level. It will help us build on the work we have already started, in supporting our customers through these changes.

So now's the time for action. To ready ourselves for the tsunami, we've grown our Money Smart Team by five new members drawn from across our business. We wanted to draw on the great skills and experience of staff, who know the business inside and out and they have truly hit the ground running. They are speaking to everyone affected by size criteria (bedroom tax) and the benefit cap, outlining the impacts on individuals and their families and working through the various option available.

We are delighted to have launched LEAP, our own work programme, to help unemployed tenants become “work ready”, gain qualifications, work experience and apprenticeships.

With a new expanded Money Smart Team the emphasis has changed, from being reactive and receiving referrals for support to being proactive. Now that we are contacting customers we are able to support them in many ways, not just with welfare reforms, but emergency support from the City’s Foodbank, providing debt advice, access to cheap furniture and new white goods in association with the City’s Credit Union.

We know that customers will need to alter the way they budget, with many needing to move from operating on a weekly basis to monthly. We are working with customers, giving advice on budgeting and this is proving to be a mammoth task. The key here is choice; we hope that by informing our customers they will be able to make decisions about their financial future.We are working with our City’s credit union to develop a suitable product for customers to allow them to effectively continue with “direct payments” of rent.

This month we are holding our first “speed dating” (or “speed mutual exchange”) event in the North of the City, where tenants, both those who are under-occupying and those who are over-crowded, can meet to see if they can resolve their housing issues by selecting a mutual exchange.

Then in December as part of WMBUS (West Midlands partnership Best Use of Stock) we will partner with several housing providers in a similar “speed dating” event, which will provide a wide choice of properties and tenures.

All in, it's a lot of action that will hopefully go some way to supporting our customers and the city to deal with the impact of welfare reform.

Thank you very much to Anne Herrmann who is leading on our welfare reform approach at Wolverhampton Homes for providing this information.