Salford City Council: Taking a rights-based approach to advice

The Welfare Rights, Debt Advice and Fairer Charging Service aims to tackle poverty and reduce health inequalities in Salford by combining the delivery of social welfare advice focused on social security, debt and homelessness reduction with social policy work.


About the Welfare Rights, Debt Advice and Fairer Charging Service

The ethos of the service is to empower citizens on low incomes to understand and access their rights and to feel in control. It uses evidence from practice including the voice of residents to inform its approach and ensure internal council, partner and national systems work for everyone whilst addressing socio-economic inequalities as a priority. This integrated model enables the service to directly help over 4,000 Salford residents access justice each year, bringing in around five million pounds per annum to low-income households.

Recent initiatives and developments

Building on the long-standing model of providing specialist welfare rights advice in primary care for patients by embedding a specialist debt adviser in a GP practice using funding from public health. This is complimented by additional welfare rights provision in secondary mental health care, with the majority of referrals coming through from the home-based treatment team.

Work with national charity Surviving Economic Abuse to pilot the use of a single mechanism to inform a creditor that debts are as a result of domestic/financial abuse, outlining the wishes of the client and enabling victims-survivors to achieve economic independence. This will be further supported by the creation of a new Domestic Abuse Financial Inclusion role which will focus on these issues and on tenancy sustainment. 

The development of a bespoke advice pathway into welfare rights advice during the COVID-19 pandemic for residents approaching the council to apply for Test and Trace payments when self-isolating. This is currently being expanded to provide support to people post-hospital discharge who have long covid alongside the Council’s Health Improvement Service.

Delivering a programme of training to frontline workers on welfare reform with a strong focus on key workers in children’s and adult social care, housing providers, mental health services and foodbanks. This training helps workers to identify financial issues as part of other assessments to ensure residents are referred into the Welfare Rights and Debt Advice Service for timely preventative advice.

The development of a research action proposal alongside the University of Salford and other local authorities to understand and develop innovative solutions around the growing numbers of household with a deficit/negative budget, recognising traditional approaches are becoming less effective and focusing on new approaches using levers available to local government.

Resources

Website: The Salford Way

Contact

Catherine Connors ([email protected])