Helping the UK Get Ready

I always remember a story a young man told me once about what it felt like to not have money, to be poor. And he said it felt like he'd lost his layer of skin. And to him, that meant that even just a gentle brush past you is going to hurt. It meant that if you got hit, it was going to go deep. And he said that people can see it all over you. 

There are one and a half million people with a learning disability [in the UK]. This isn't a small, marginal group of people who policymakers and businesses can think are irrelevant. This is a substantial chunk of our society. So Mencap is a learning disability charity. We exist so that people with the learning disability can live life to the full. And that means having choice over their lives. It means having access to their community. So making sure that if people have more profound needs, that the support is always there for them to get up in the morning, to eat safely, to get the toilet safely, to get out into the community. People who have maybe less need, making sure they have the ability to see friends, to get a job, to live life the way they want to live it. 

Financial confidence is really important for everybody and it's certainly important for people with a learning disability. So, we're going to be leading on workshops for people with learning disabilities across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And the workshops are going to cover a range of aspects of finances and money, but the core content will be around budgeting and planning, where your money comes from, what sort of things you need to pay for, but also your choices in the processes and what your rights are too. 

So, our partnership with the Aviva Foundation is really important on many levels. I mean, first of all, and fundamentally, if we're working on financial confidence, then here's an organisation that does financial confidence. So, you know, one of the things we always think in a charity is we can't do everything. There are experts in things that are important to people with a learning disability. There are experts in finance, there are experts in transport, there are experts in employment. We want to make sure we're working with the experts. So, the expertise that comes with a partnership with the Aviva Foundation is really important. 

So the Aviva Foundation is a charitable foundation that focuses on helping fund practical solutions for today's problems and investing in longer term change. So we're focused purely on social impact. The future the Foundation is trying to support is to help people weather life's shocks that come along. For some people, they're just one bill away from experiencing really challenging times in their lives. And so what we want to do as a foundation is try to help people get ready, look forward with confidence to the future. 

I think for everyone, feeling confident about money is a complex subject. people have said that banking and building societies can be difficult, that the majority of the resources, the staff aren't necessarily trained to work with people with a learning disability. So, there's very little easy read materials which is accessible for people who may struggle to read long-winded banking information. Also, attitudes. Quite often, people will talk to parents or carers and not to the person who's just asked them the question about their own banking. 

some people told me that their parents will give them a daily allowance. And quite often that's cash. And that causes problems because as we move to a cashless society, if you're going to the cinema, you may not even be able to buy your ticket in advance without a card. you don't tend to come across people who have credit cards. But on the other hand, I didn't come across anybody I spoke to who talked about savings either. Nobody I spoke to had ever been given as an adult any information about budgeting, about where their money comes from, about how much is coming in, about how much they have to spend on their care or their bills. 

I was visiting a project But I said, does anybody have problems? And there's one person said, yes, I've had times when I don't have enough money for food to last me till the end of the month. That was one of those learning moments where you think, wow, this is why it's needed. financial complexity, financial access affects people with a learning disability in a couple of ways. I mean first of all families that include a a disabled person, have a more expensive life than the general population So first of all there's just access to money at all. Secondly people with a learning disability often have to rely on somebody else to support them in managing their money. First of all that limits their choice but also there's a risk there to financial abuse. 

When someone feels confident managing their money, they'll have more choice, more control, and more independence. I suppose when that confidence isn't there, they'll often rely on others in a way that they don't want to or they don't need to. And even when there is support with the right kind of education that we are able to deliver as part of this program, can go on to be more independent and be more confident with their money. 

Co-creation means people with a learning disability are involved not just in what the answer is but in framing the question. It's so important that people with a learning disability are involved in designing solutions, because they're experts in their own life, and the power of lived experience is huge. You can't beat that. they have a role in shaping the language that we use for a program. They will help us design the resources that we use and the materials. They'll help us look at the workshop delivery that, you know, are part of this program, and also they'll help us define what success looks like because they're leading it. 

I'm William Kettle. I'm a Lived Experience Advisor at Mencap. So my role is to provide a lived experience perspective to colleagues at Mencap and also to people outside Mencap too, I advise on policy, campaigns sometimes, projects, But that's what I do for my job. It's important, I suppose, to co-produce it, because then people with a learning disability get involved in the very beginning on it, and if they are, then their views are taken into account and they understand what it is, and it's not just a tick box thing where you just go to the end and say, "Look, how's this?" Because it's not a good idea to do that. From the start is important, if they shape the programs and the projects, then they can give their views, and their views are heard by everyone, and not just people with disabilities, but also people outside here as well. They get to see and hear what people with disabilities think about these sorts of projects, 

So we were asked to do a workshop on this to help people with financial literacy. So that basically means to help people with disabilities manage money we kind of plan what those sessions were gonna be 

So we were put into groups and we had to answer some questions they were also of like money and obviously what different ways that you can manage money but also what platforms you use to manage it. 

So we used a spinner to answer some of the questions. it was, what would you do if you had a certain amount of money? So it was all different kinds of amounts. Some people wanted holidays, some people wanted a day out, some people wanted other things. I hadn't really done that sort of work before, about managing money and obviously, a lot of people struggle with that. It makes life harder, doesn't it? But I suppose if they're given the right support and advice, they don't think they can get through these periods of uncertainty and anxiety in some cases. 

So I come to this with no preconceived ideas about what it's going to look like, what it's going to feel like and the kind of change it's going to aim to seek. In some ways what excites me most is I want to see things I haven't expected. 

I think in one of our co-production groups, we had someone who had absolutely zero knowledge of how to manage their own money. Zero knowledge around budgeting. Benefits. Paying their own bills. I think we thought maybe we would need... the workshops might be more top level stuff and there may be a baseline knowledge of people being able to manage money, but we will have people who are coming on these workshops who have absolutely no experience at all in managing their own money. I think that was a bit of a light bulb moment for us that we're going to make a real huge difference. we're not just working with people who've already got experience when we're actually working with people who've got no experience at all. So to improve their confidence by five or 10% is going to make a real long lasting impact. 

So, I think what we've learned from past projects about what works and what doesn't in terms of, I guess, co-production is it's really important to keep things simple and also make things relevant to the individual, you know, so they can feel involved and really a part of that conversation. what doesn't work is assuming that one size fits all. You're going to get nowhere. And also, if you overwhelm people with too much information, particularly if it's inaccessible. 

We designed the face-to-face workshops for people with learning disabilities to be fun, accessible. 

We're choosing venues which will be exciting and interesting in their own right. want to attract people with learning disabilities, some of whom have never heard of Mencap, We want to go as far and wide as possible in terms of who comes to our workshops. 

You know, a lot of our work is focused on supporting the people with a learning disability to feel more confident with their money. And that's, you know, that's huge. And we've heard about the impact that's going to have. But it's only really effective if we're also working with their support staff and their support networks. And that's what's really exciting about this program, we're able to reach those networks, you know, not just staff, but, you know, we can work with families as well so that they can support their children. And so the change is on lasting. 

And so we hope that individuals will have that information that they need. They'll have care and support around them so that there are people who know about money and finances and benefits to help them. also, we're building some of the training on two Mencap's staff training portal so that when this project finishes, staff can still engage in the training online as part of their inductions and as part of their staff training. 

So when someone goes from feeling excluded to feeling more in control, it's often small moments, but really meaningful moments. It could be something as small as somebody feeling confident to ask a question that they wouldn't have asked before, or even being able to make more decisions by themselves and for themselves, like paying a bill, or even planning a budget. You may even see their body language change. They might relax. You see the confidence in their face and in their body. It can even be moments when people, you know, they say something as simple as, I can do this, they may seem small, but those moments are really life-changing for the people we support. 

Financial confidence is really about choice in how we live our lives. So, the first time I felt the inequality of people with a learning disability was in my childhood. I lived next door to a boy exactly the same age as me, called Paul, and our lives were identical in every way, except Paul had Down syndrome and I didn't. And I watched the inequality between my life and Paul's life roll out from literally from the age of zero to the age of 18. So in Paul's life and my life as as children in the very, very early years, you didn't see the inequality at all. But then, you know, we used to play together we used to go swimming together. But then what we saw was first of all, he would be in a different classroom in the school, then he would be in a different school, then he'd be in a school in a different town. And, you know, there's a complete unfairness in that. And, you know, he will probably have gone on to either some supported employment in some way, maybe he lives in a care home and will die 20 years younger than me if the averages work. You know, all of that is is unfair throughout our lives. I had choice. Paul didn't have choice. 

So the problem if we don't fix financial confidence is people who are shut out, people who have less choice will be more shut out and have even less choice. This isn't standing still. If access to the financial system is becoming more complex, even if we stand still, people become more locked out. So I think a huge amount is at stake. One and a half million people not having the same access to money as the rest of the population. When it's one and a half million people who are marginalised in so many other ways, it exacerbates that. And surely as a society, we don't want people to be locked out in that way.

 We want at the end that people with learning disabilities who engage in this massive piece of work have choice, that they know what's possible. And even if they don't want any changes to the arrangements, they know what's possible and they have that choice. 

Everyone deserves to feel as if they have some element of control over where their money's spent. Everyone deserves to feel that they can use some of their money for things that make them really happy. 

So, how will we know it's working by asking people with their own disability what impact it's having on their lives. 

Understanding is crucial with something like this, don't be afraid to ask questions about it There is help there available if you want it, or need it, more specifically, if you need it. If they're given the support, they can do things that people think they can't. look at people's abilities not disabilities.