'Finances impact everything': Helping the media understand the reality of poverty
Melanie Lock, a member of the Grassroots Poverty Action Group, speaks about how 'experts by experience' can help writers and researchers better understand the vice-like grip of poverty
In 2010, when Melanie Lock’s son was eighteen-months old, she separated from her husband, and became a single parent. This was the start of the Conservative-led government’s austerity years. Over the next fourteen years they drastically sanded down spending across the public sector. The burden, charities and nonprofits pointed out, fell particularly harshly on low-income single mothers—with welfare and tax credits slashed and public services like youth clubs and Sure Start centers shuttered.
Melanie found herself caring for a young child alongside trying to work. It was a struggle. It was hard to hold down a job while also making sure she picked her son up from school. What happens in the school holidays when there’s no money for childcare? What could she do when rent and bills kept rising but her income flatlined? ‘Being a single mum, there’s no fallback, and the safety net is supposed to catch you,’ she told me. ‘But it just left me with a massive black hole and made my situation worse.’ When she battled her way out of one financial crisis, it seemed like another was waiting around the corner.
A few years back, Melanie got involved with a project launched by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity aimed at ending poverty in the UK. The project sought to integrate the expertise of people who’d experienced poverty into the JRF’s research and campaigning, aiming to design a more ‘compassionate policy response’ so that ‘so people can live with dignity rather than simply exist.’ It’s part of a new wave of similar projects that seek to learn from ‘experts by experience,’ shaking up the reportorial tendency to value a quote from a professor over a person who’s encountered a system firshand.
I reached out to Melanie for an interview about bringing her own lived experience to the JRF group. (Full disclosure, the JRF have provided funding for this newsletter; but they do not have editorial oversight.) We talked about the isolation of poverty, the media’s role in perpetuating stigma, and what she wants from the new Labour government. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
JB: The Grassroots Poverty Action Group is made up of people with direct experience of poverty, helping to guide JRF’s research and analysis. For people who might not be familiar with the group’s work, can you explain your involvement and the impact it’s had?
ML: I believe we’re actually getting to the point now where we're respected more as a source of trust. Normally, if there’s anything on poverty from the JRF, we’re the first people that they speak to, to get our opinion. There are a lot of press releases—we continually, as a group, try and get the message out that poverty is everyone’s problem. It’s not necessarily seen. I first started with the group in 2019. My son calls it his second family. And it is like seeing a second family when we meet up. We’ve met each other since 2020, on Zoom calls, and now we get to actually give each other a hug. Because we go through the shit we’re going through, it’s very cathartic. In our most recent meeting we had a discussion on: What would we like to say to the new government about poverty? And it brings out a lot of our own experiences. They can be quite hard sessions. We talk about everything, from lighthearted topics to the feeling of hopelessness.
Reading about the group, one of the things that comes up repeatedly is how it’s fostered a sense of solidarity, a kind of defense against the isolation that experiencing poverty can so often provoke. Do you relate to that?
I totally do. Especially as you tend to lose a lot of friends along the way, because they don’t understand. Whether it’s because you can’t afford to go out on a Friday night to the pub, or whatever, you become isolated. You’re stuck in your house. Before the cost of living crisis, you might have told your kids, ‘Have a friend over.’ But we’ve found that, because prices have gone up so much, like the cost of a Pizza Express pizza going up from £2.50 or whatever to £6 or £7-a-go, or a cheap pizza going up from £1 to £3, it’s a big difference. It’s not something you can afford to do. It’s become harder to get that social aspect. The cost of the pub is just ridiculous, and a night out is extortionate. And it leads to isolation.
I often think of poverty as a kind of pincer movement—you’ve got insecure low-wage work, high housing costs, rising living costs and inadequate welfare assistance all closing in from different angles. You’ve previously spoken about how austerity accelerated that. Particularly in the last few years, with Covid and then the cost of living crisis, what are the major things that have been pressing in for you and your son?
There’s the need to get food when it’s reduced or on offer, and pay the bills, and get my son sorted, and energy prices have gone up massively. Bills haven’t really come down. There’s this, as you say, pincering movement on things like days out, or activities, or after-school clubs, and I don’t want to deprive my son of things. He’s got GCSEs this year, and he’s had to suffer deprivation throughout his life. Things like birthday parties, where we haven’t got the space in our house for a full-blown party. I’ve had to find cheaper, alternative ways to do things—like finding a Groupon voucher, or baking the cake myself, or buying Christmas presents for the following year in the January sales. Christmas shopping never ends!
A core part of the Grassroots Poverty Action Group’s work is about breaking down stigma, and highlighting some of the hidden, insidious ways that the stigma of poverty is baked into social life. For instance, a recent report highlighted things like the doors of a housing estate painted different colors for renters or owners; children singled out at school for being unable to afford cooking ingredients; housing officers suggest people sell their books and CDs when struggling. How important has breaking down stigma been to the group’s work?
Yeah, people don’t see that. I’ve had to borrow money for things like my son’s school uniform, as, because he goes to a new school, there wasn’t any second-hand uniform. Or things like, when my son had a friend over (we live in quite an affluent area in Surrey), they asked, ‘Why are you living in a flat instead of a house?’ And it was like, ‘Well, because I haven’t got the money to live in a house.’ My son says he feels people do look down on him because we’re poor. They know we’re renting, because everyone knows everyone around here. To be honest, I’ve tried not to look for that stigma, so I don’t necessarily see it. I keep that door closed. Nowadays, the poor are kind of hidden. With the fact you’ve got shops like Primark, where you can get cheap clothing, you can hide poverty more, it’s not like the nineteenth-century when you couldn’t hide the fact you were poor. Today it’s more things like malnutrition in children, rather than them going around wearing rags.
In terms of the stigma of people experiencing poverty, what role do you feel the media plays in perpetuating some of these stigmas, which cause shame and embarrassment for those who have been forced below the poverty line? Do you have any advice for news organizations covering poverty now?
It should be about highlighting some of the issues people don’t see. It was things like Wayne and Waynetta Slob [a sketch by comedians Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke] that helped create this belief that people on benefits are lazy, or why British people don’t take on low-wage work that migrants often do. Instead, the media should be looking at why it’s not feasible for people to take on those jobs. I know governments like to say it pays to work, but in many cases it doesn’t pay to work—not unless you can get stability, and the right level of pay, and have work that fits around your caring or childcare responsibilities. A lot of people are up to their eyeballs in debt, and have to work a million hours to keep afloat. What happened to the days when a mortgage was only three times a salary and was achievable? Now mums are having to do full-time work and raise children—to do it all, and rely on food banks to make ends meet. Then there’s the stigma of turning up at a food bank and not being able to choose what food you get. It feels derogatory, like there’s a lack of human rights. It’s not right.
Another topic that’s been raised again and again by the group is the relationship between poverty and health. Can you talk more about the impact of that?
Yeah, you know, if you’re not eating properly, because you can’t afford fresh fruit and veg or meat for three meals a day, that’s going to impact your health. And it’s really hard to go and exercise if you’re struggling to feed your family, or you’re depressed. I know because I’ve been there. Your diet is probably the last thing you worry about when you’re feeling like that. When I first got divorced, and the emotional and financial fallout of that, I went through stages of not eating anything, because of the emotional strain of everything on my head. And it catches up with you at a later date.
Yeah, and having that pincer movement—whether it’s high rents, energy and grocery prices going up, school costs—that must have such a stressful impact on mental health too.
Yeah, it’s your finances, isn’t it? If your finances aren’t in the right position, it impacts everything. Because you have this constant worry: ‘Am I going to make ends meet?’ The JRF did a financial assessment on what income was coming in for people, and I was in what they called ‘deep poverty.’ And when you’re in that for a number of years, it’s very difficult to get your head above water. After so many years of continual fighting, you almost give up. You just think, ‘What’s the point?’ When I came to the JRF I was feeling like that. But going back to your previous question, by meeting up in the group and having some solidarity, it helps you become stronger as a team. It helps you not feel such a failure. I always felt like such a failure with my life. I compared myself to others. I thought, ‘Why is no one else going through this?’ It helps that other people are feeling it now; it’s affecting normal people now who are having to go on benefits, so there’s more compassion from people outside.
But still, there’s a lot of shame about going on benefits. You hear people say things like, ‘I’ve never had to go on benefits before,’ as if they’ve done something right, rather than it being lucky or, as the saying goes, by the grace of God that they haven’t. Then people on benefits are always shamed into feeling, you know, we’re all ‘scroungers.’ But it makes you think, ‘Why am I being penalized for £50 here and there, when there are true crimes going on—like Covid contracts fraud of billions of pounds—and they don’t seem to be doing anything?’
Finally, we’ve got a new government in office. What are you hoping to see from them in terms of tackling poverty over the next few years?
One of the things is housing. Until we can sort out the housing situation it’s going to be incredibly tough. How can anyone manage a £600 increase in rent with no help? It’s okay if you’ve got social housing. But if you haven’t, and you’re in privately rented [housing], it’s a totally different kettle of fish. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety about potentially not having a roof over your head in two months [under current section 21 evictions, which Labour has promised to ban]. We’re lucky enough to have lived for eleven years in our property, but we’ve not known from year-to-year whether we’d get a lease extension, not knowing whether we’d face the trauma or not of almost facing homelessness. We were issued a section 21 eviction notice in May, which expires 21 August, and looking at two-bedroom flats they all have an increase of £600 or £700-a-month.
In terms of other things, I think it needs to be short-term and it needs to be long-term. A lot of what needs to happen has got to be done within six months, otherwise people will start losing faith with them quite quickly. We’ve said in the group, we don’t see things being able to change that quickly—but they need to tackle finances for people. The NHS is a big one. You’ve got a sandwiched generation, like me, who are looking after both parents and their own kids. The care system has really let people down, with a lot of people having to do unpaid care themselves. But it’s expensive when you’re running people to people to hospital left-right-and-center. And if you’re working over fourteen hours a week on the living wage you lose access to the carer’s allowance. So that’s a big one. And I think employment, which seems to be very precarious at the moment. Many organizations seem to be closing. You look at the high street—what are people going to do when all the shops on the high street close down if they don’t have digital skills? What happens if there’s no good employment and people can’t afford to live?
But while Labour have picked up on little bits of it—like saying, ‘Oh, yes, we’re going to sort housing out’—they’ve barely mentioned poverty at all, which is something we’ve all picked up on in the group.🗨️
In other news…
I reported a piece for the Guardian about people impacted by the UK’s two-child limit on universal credit. ‘I’ll leave myself empty the whole day,’ one mother told me. Last week Labour punished rebels for voting in favor of abolishing the cap.
The course I teach on longform nonfiction writing—delivered remotely through City, University of London—begins on 28 September and enrolments are now open.