Free social welfare advice services play a crucial role in tackling the underlying causes of poverty, by helping Londoners to resolve complex problems in their lives. This new report from London Funders provides much-needed data on how advice services are funded in London, the risks facing the sector, and the opportunities for greater collaboration between funders and improved funder practice to strengthen the provision of advice in the city.
Hundreds of thousands of Londoners each year visit a free social welfare advice service. At an advice service, people are supported by trained advisors to find solutions to their legal problems related to welfare benefits, debt, immigration, employment and housing. An advisor might help someone to claim the benefits they’re entitled to, regularise their immigration status, challenge an unlawful employer, or manage their debts. These solutions are underpinned by legal rights and require varying levels of legal knowledge and expertise from advisors. Receiving advice can provide people with a way out of a complex situation, reduce financial pressures and improve their health and wellbeing.
Millions of pounds each year is invested in free social welfare legal advice in London, mostly by local authorities, with independent trusts and foundations also supporting the sector. But the need for advice is far greater than services are funded to meet.
Across the city, frontline advice services are pushed to capacity; phonelines are inundated with calls, and advisors are working extremely hard to support as many people as they can. Crisis after crisis has led to higher numbers of people seeking advice, with increasingly complex needs, and the amount of funding to enable advice services to meet this demand is fragile and threatened by pressures on local authorities, who still provide the backbone of funding for advice services.
So that funders can better understand how to tackle the gap between demand, provision and future capacity, the Greater London Authority has funded London Funders to create this new independent report, Mapping Funding for Social Welfare Advice in London, which examines the current picture of funding going into advice in London.
This report, published by London Funders this week, uses data from 360Giving to give funders a snapshot of which organisations are funding advice in London, how much funding is provided, and which types of advice services are funded. It builds on this analysis with insights from interviews with people who are responsible for funding advice, from different settings including local authorities as well as independent trusts and foundations. The report outlines the work taking place across London, despite stretched budgets, to improve the way advice is funded.
Some of the challenges described in the report will be very familiar to those working in, or funding, the advice sector, or those who have read the Advice Services Alliance landmark 2020 report Advising Londoners. Funding insufficiency across the board, with particular gaps in the provision of specialist and community-based advice, as well as recruitment, retention and wellbeing issues for staff are described in detail.
Ultimately, funding advice should be viewed as a key lever to tackle poverty, address health inequality and achieve social justice
But encouragingly, there are also plenty of exciting examples of work taking place to plug gaps and address challenges, which this report allows funders to learn from and build on. London’s Integrated Care Boards are working to embed advice in clinical pathways, to help tackle the underlying causes of poor health. Funders and advice sector organisations are working together through the Advice Workforce Development Fund, which addresses training, upskilling and recruitment gaps in the sector, and many are starting to ring-fence funding for efforts to support advisers’ wellbeing. And some funders are increasingly focused on investing in services which challenge the system alongside frontline advocacy, recognising that addressing underlying issues is more effective than applying short-term fixes.
It’s exciting to see that the advice sector is channelling this spirit of innovation into a shared approach to tackling the challenges facing advice services in London. At the Greater London Authority, we are working with advice sector partners including the London Legal Support Trust and London Citizens Advice to support the early development of a London Advice Strategy, which is part of the Advice Workforce Development Fund, led by the London Legal Support Trust. The strategy will bring together a diverse range of funders and frontline organisations to address the funding, workforce, coordination and capacity challenges in advice in London. This London Funders report is the first step in the journey – because we can’t improve the way advice is funded without understanding where we’re starting from.
Ultimately, funding advice should be viewed as a key lever to tackle poverty, address health inequality and achieve social justice. This report shows that most of the funding for organisations providing advice comes from a relatively small group of funders. There is a real opportunity to expand the number and type of organisations who invest in advice in the future, by communicating why advice matters and what it can do for people, communities and economies.
Lizzie Mahoney is Principal Policy Officer, Financial Hardship, at the Greater London Authority. She co-chairs the London Advice Strategy.
You can download a copy of the full report: Mapping Funding for Social Welfare Advice in London as well as an Executive Summary