What They Are Owed

Frances Ryan writes:

“Will Santa find me?” a subject line in my inbox asked last week. I wondered briefly if my niece had moved to email with her questions about the logistics of gift delivery. In fact, it was from Refuge: a Christmas appeal for children spending the holidays with their mums in a women’s shelter.

Over the past fortnight, I’ve seen more marketing for charities than supermarkets: from Instagram ads by Crisis hosting Christmas dinner and support for homeless people to X posts by Action for Children hoping to get gifts for kids whose parents can’t afford one.

Cash-strapped charities are smart to try to squeeze every last drop from the season of goodwill: the British public are expected to give an estimated £2.8bn to good causes during November and December this year, according to research by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). The festive period is typically the peak for generosity, when half of the public say they always or usually donate to charity compared with the third of people who regularly give money throughout the rest of the year.

It’s heartwarming in some respects. At a time when most of us splurge on Baileys and novelty jumpers, all while the weather turns colder, it’s not trite to say we should think of those struggling to even buy regular warm meals. I’m ambassador for the Hygiene Bank and I know its Shower People With Kindness campaign – which aims to get shampoo and deodorant to people in poverty this Christmas – will be a lifeline for many.

And yet there is something inescapably bleak about a Britain that relies on philanthropy to tackle its social and economic problems. After years of cuts to public services and growing destitution, charities increasingly provide anything from food packages and debt advice to housing support. The safety net once provided by the social security system and council services has been outsourced to a patchwork of grassroots groups, to the point where meeting basic human needs – being fed, clothed and housed – relies on fundraising in December as well as taxation in April.

This is Victorian Christmas 2024, in which the strains of poverty and disability are eased – not by the welfare state – but the kindness of strangers. Forget fair benefits or decent wages, there are volunteers with Santa hats outside John Lewis shaking buckets for change.

This is clearly inadequate for the level of need out there. As of last month, more than 16 million people are living in poverty, or a staggering 24% of the UK population – the highest since records began. Over 9 million of these are in deep poverty, meaning they’re struggling to afford enough food or pay energy bills. More than a million children don’t even have their own bed. It’s no surprise that a survey of voluntary organisations by the CAF found that 86% say demand for their services has increased over the past year, with poverty-relief charities reporting the biggest rise. Goodwill alone cannot fix the holes in the safety net.

Philanthropy as a means to address hardship isn’t just impractical – it’s wrong. It ignores the structural inequalities that lead to poverty and illness and lets the state off its responsibility to fix them. It suggests the problem is a lack of individual generosity rather than how we collectively organise the economy and society. It robs people of the dignity and autonomy that tax-funded support can bring, forcing the poorest to hold a figurative begging bowl up in place of their rights. Or to put it another way: no one should have to use a donation bin to have clean hair for Christmas.

Moreover, the normalisation of charity shifts the conversation away from taxation as the means to redistribute the country’s increasingly unequal wealth. Just last week, the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, floated the idea of a flat tax rate that would see the richest taxed at the same level as the poorest. Such a policy would simply be the next step in how the ruling class already protects its interests, where the wealthy write a cheque to the local hospital while hiring an accountant to wriggle out of a big tax bill. If you want to see this attitude in practice, look to the rightwing newspapers that launch charity appeals for people in hardship at Christmas after spending the previous 11 months championing the very policies that impoverished them.

In a year that finally saw the end of the latest era of Tory rule, the potential – and limits – of government has felt particularly palpable. With more than one in three children below the breadline after a decade of austerity, children’s charities are in the unenviable position of trying to clear up the mess politicians have left. When I see the Barnardo’s Christmas appeal for warm blankets and pyjamas for children, I cannot help but think of Labour’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit limit this year.

Clement Attlee said: “Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.” As we hurtle into 2025, perhaps it is time our society edged towards such progress. Modern Britain should not be run like the final pages of A Christmas Carol, in which Tiny Tim must rely on Scrooge waking up in a good mood to be permitted to live. Donate to a good cause this Christmas, please. But don’t forget the unseasonal truth: every time a charity helps a person find food or clothes, it is a sign of government failure.

And Polly Toynbee writes:

At the stroke of midnight on Saturday night, the shutters came down. Anyone who didn’t claim pension credit by then will have lost their winter fuel payment. Pension credit is designed to help low-income pensioners with living costs, and only those on this means-tested benefit qualify for winter fuel payments. Yet up to 880,000 older people entitled to pension credit don’t claim it. They’re only some of millions of people who aren’t getting their benefits. Last year, a total of £23bn in benefits and social support went unclaimed.

There are far fewer pensioners living in poverty today than there were when the winter fuel allowance was introduced back in 1997, so means testing it by linking it to pension credit makes sense [Polly, you would rightly have gone bananas if the Tories had done this]. Thanks to the pension triple lock, most pensioners will be better off by up to £472 a year from April 2025. Why give a winter fuel payment to Bernie Ecclestone, Rod Stewart, or to me? Until now, kind-hearted better-off pensioners donated their allowance to charity. Less kind people mocked the welfare state’s apparent extravagance. Fraser Nelson, former editor of the Spectator, described: “A millionaire I know [who] has a tradition every year: he buys a bottle of vintage wine with his winter fuel payment and invites friends to drink it. His point is that it’s ludicrous that people like him are given handouts by the government.” [What does he get for a couple of hundred quid? This is rubbish.]

There will be no jeroboams this year. Despite the outburst of posed pictures of freezing pensioners in the rightwing press, public opinion is evenly divided on this means testing. A universal benefit inflames the myth of a spendthrift welfare state, but it also ensures everyone gets what’s owed to them. This change saves the government about £1.3bn, so that brings a strong obligation to raise the pension credit threshold to include old people who are living only just above it. Qualifying for even a little pension credit opens a gateway to a free TV licence, housing benefit, reduced council tax or help with NHS costs. The government has been urging people to claim, and the Department for Work and Pensions has hired an extra 500 people to clear the backlog.

All this shines a light on the pensioners who aren’t getting what they’re due. Even when people do claim the benefits they are entitled to, Britain’s miserly system means there are still 14.4 million people living below the official poverty line. A scandalous one in three children are poor, twice as many as the one in six pensioners, but that still leaves still 2.1m poor old people. Still, consider the destitution of those who don’t even get what they are owed.

Plainly a portion of the £23bn saved in unclaimed benefits should be spent on finding these missing people. Why don’t they claim? It’s easy to forget that huge numbers of people don’t watch the news, don’t vote and are unconnected to local services that could help. Many of them are desperate: Citizens Advice finds that 5 million people are living on “negative budgets”, which means that even once they get help with claiming everything due to them, their incomes are lower than the basic costs of housing, energy, water and food. Healthy start money for young children’s milk and food can add £1,000 to a family budget, but only about 60% of those eligible claim it. Schools try their best to reach families not claiming free school meals, but they need more support to find the 800,000 students who are missing out, in households so poor that their parents earn less than £7,400.

“Pride” is sometimes given as the glib explanation for why people don’t claim their benefits. Yet ignorance, mental illness, semi-literacy, fear of rejection, fear of officialdom or difficulty applying online are among multitudes of barriers that people face. About 20% of people entitled to universal credit don’t claim it. Social tariffs for water and energy also go unclaimed, and only 5% of low-income households signed up to the deeply discounted broadband tariffs they are entitled to.

Finding these missing people should be easy. Policy in Practice, a social policy and analytics company, shows how to do it. Its software uses DWP and local council tax records to identify who is owed and to help them claim. About 60 local authorities pay for this service, but the government should roll it out nationally. Despite pinched finances, scores of councils find it pays to get elderly people their benefits, to prevent them from needing social care or ending up in A&E. Some councils use the government’s £500m household support fund to give the winter fuel payment to those who sit just above the threshold for means testing.

But the founder of Policy in Practice, Deven Ghelani, told me that they could find many more claimants if one obstacle was removed: HMRC refuses to hand over data on incomes and taxes on the grounds of privacy, even while the DWP and councils hand over benefits information willingly. Breaking this obsession with privacy requires an urgent change in the law (I would make all incomes and taxes public, as in Finland, but that’s another issue). For now, HMRC should make information available to those authorised to find missing claimants.

In a country so unequal, where poor people are 22% worse off than their French equivalents, and benefit cuts fall heaviest on children, government has a powerful obligation to ensure everyone at least gets what they are owed. Rightwing relish for benefit-cheat stories means we hear a lot more about the £6.4bn lost to fraud than we do about the £23bn missing from the pockets of those who need it most. Labour promises that it will be returning to its pledge to end child poverty. That couldn’t be more urgent, and finding the non-claimants is something it should be doing right now.