Community links is one of the 27 charities challenging government today over the £16bn in benefits that go unclaimed every year. The campaign, coordinated by Citizens Advice, wants government to set targets to improve the take-up of means-tested benefits, ensuring that money earmarked for some of the most vulnerable people actually reaches them.
It’s an issue we’ve been aware of for some time. About 12,000 people visit Community Links’ advice service every year for support with benefits, housing and debt. Last year we helped them claim over £1.3m in benefits they were entitled to but not receiving.
Last year’s Benefit Take-up Task Force, which we sat on, looked at the issue and some progress was made as a result. Targets for housing benefit take up have now been included in the Audit Commission’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) for local authorities, and there is support from the Treasury to push this.
However the difficulty lies in the fact that, as always government departments do not work together very well. As different departments issue different benefits – HMRC for Working Tax Credits, DWP for out of work benefits, local authorities for housing benefit – it makes it very difficult to create and impose targets for benefit take up as a whole. There is a concern that targets will deter agencies, acting as a barrier to encouraging them to do more. This complexity is also one reason why people don’t access them in the first place.
Nevertheless it is clear something must be done. Citizens Advice highlight that four out of five low paid workers without children (1.2bn households) miss out on tax credits worth at least £38 per week, a total of £1.9 billion, and as many as half of working households entitled to housing benefit do not claim it. There’s a similar story with council tax benefit, pension credit, and child tax credit.
Access to these extra benefits could take households above the point of desperate struggle, into a situation where they’re able to look forward and plan for the future. There are many reasons why people don’t claim everything they’re entitled to – we frequently meet people who just don’t know about them, people who think they could get them but are left baffled by the complexity of the system, and those who want to but don’t know how.
Targets will ensure that local authorities, job centres, and other offices make active efforts to ensure people access all their benefits – better advertising, more support, more accessible information. Therefore we fully support Citizens Advice on this benefits take-up campaign.
Did you know that of the seven million people deemed ‘economically inactive’ in the UK, two million would like to work? Or that last year 22% of women were in jobs earning less than £7 an hour? Or that many people moving off benefits into work end up no better off?