We can no longer afford to be indifferent

We may derive comfort from thinking it would never happen to us and that individuals are completely responsible for their current circumstances. You hear it in language; “you are living beyond your means” “why did you allow this to happen” “you need to buy different brands”.

You see it in social policy; money continues to be stripped away from benefits and services designed to help those at risk from getting access to the help they would otherwise deserve. Try calling a helpline and you will quickly discover the grim reality, that you, like every other caller, will hit obstacle after obstacle’. It’s like help exists in name only.  

Indifference allows us to be comfortably protected from the harsh reality that there are millions of people and families struggling within this existence. Human beings, families, children that are worried where the next meal will come from, kept up at night because they are about to be made homeless when the temperature is minus zero, people forced to make serious decisions about how they will heat the home and feed the children.  

The safety nets put in place over Covid have been removed. At St Giles, the reversal to the Universal Credit increases represented a 20-25 per cent reduction in the weekly income of our clients. Our services are increasingly focussing on ensuring the 113,000 people we help each year do not fall deeper and deeper into the poverty trap.

That’s the thing about my role; I live and work in the gutter of other people’s realities; consciously looking when others turn away is almost second nature to me and when you choose to do so you learn very quickly that nothing exists in isolation.   

A couple of weeks ago, I took a phone call from a family that just had an energy meter put in to help them monitor their costs, and they are now paying around ten pounds a day for electricity in their household. That is around £300 month. They were crying, asking me what to do. Now, for this middle-aged family this meant working more hours to meet that need, but the consequence of that means less parental presence for the children, and that is something we should not ignore, ultimately those children will spend more time online and more time with their peers on the streets and that will eventually put them at risk.

Risk of being seen as anti-social and all the criminalisation elements that come with that. At risk of criminal groups that will seek to take advantage of a young person who doesn’t want to ask for anything he or she wants because they know their parents are already struggling, And there are other examples. What about children in care where their allowance has to cover everything else including the rising food costs? What about those with a criminal record who are struggling to find work? What about families with bad credit and have as a result reduced availability of choice in terms of raising funds?

This is the truth of what we are dealing with going forward and whilst ‘the shield of indifference’ may make us feel more comfortable, the reality is it’s not going to help us change anything. Through my work at St Giles, I know that the best solutions to complex problems often come from the people who have been most affected by them.  That is why those in power need to listen to local communities and the people working within them.

The antidote to indifference is empathy; we cannot afford as a society not to recognise that these people could be any of us and that they deserve our attention and support moving forward. If we are all in this together, as it was once said then we all need to stand together viewing the next person’s problems just as important as our own.

Junior Smart is SOS founder at the St Giles Trust