Changing tack: poverty, power and interacting with official services
This is the first blog in the Changing tack series. Here we introduce the concept of ‘officialdom’ and how this relates to poverty. The whole series is available here.
In our lives there are lots of people who hold a position of authority over us — the obvious ones are police officers, government officials and our boss. But there are also lots of people who have a more subtle power, who can control the support we receive and the actions that are taken against us. That might be a health professional or creditor we owe money to.
As a society we are rightly paying increasing attention to where the balance of power in these relationships and interactions becomes problematic. Sometimes this is an abuse of power by an individual, and we put in place checks and balances to tackle this. But in many ways the systems, structures and culture of organisations are what create problematic power dynamics. ‘Officialdom’ is the term for this.
Officialdom refers to the outlook or behaviour of officials, acting as a group. This creates an environment of bureaucracy and rigidity which can prevent someone accessing a service, or from doing what they want or need to do. Alternatively, it can render this slow or ineffective.
We see officialdom play out in many ways in our clients’ interactions with services and creditors. One in three (30%) of the people we help interact with an official service or creditor at least once a week, seven in ten (67%) do so at least once a month. When we asked them how their interactions with government organisations, creditors and other social services made them feel, these were some of the responses:
‘Disempowered and confused’.
‘I feel under pressure, pushed around, worthless and lied to. It feels like an abuse of power and I’m unable to fight back.’
‘Helpless and irrelevant.’
‘Any interactions were tiring and caused anxiety. Just too many things to juggle and think about. Nothing was going smoothly.’
‘Like I didn’t exist.’
Often this is exacerbated by the fact that these are people living in poverty and the perpetual state of crisis this traps someone in.
In a crisis, the human brain reacts, negatively impacting our ability to make sound decisions (cognitive bandwidth) and think longer term (present bias). When you are worrying about how you will feed your children tomorrow, you don’t have the brain power to work out how you will appeal a benefit decision, for example, or meet your expected hours of job search at the library today. This is something we’ll explore later in this series.
When we compare the frequency and number of interactions people have with official services each week or month, there is a clear link between these contacts and poverty.
Not only do people in poverty have to interact with services more often, the quality of their interactions can also be poorer because of stigma and apathy to their needs.
There is evidence that people in positions of power are more likely to hold ‘choice mindsets’. This is where they believe that people’s behaviours are the result of deliberate choices and actions. Having this mindset can lead to increased victim blaming, apathy about inequality and less interest in acting for the social good.
This issue is particularly relevant for scrutiny of the social security system because not only are people who receive income-related benefits required to interact with official government services more often, they are three times as likely to be in the ‘high contacts’ group. This means they interact with three or more services on a frequent basis in much greater numbers than those who do not receive means-tested support from social security.
As one of our Debt Advisors described it: ‘The person in poverty doesn’t have much rest as there’s always some complication to try to understand and sort out.’
The cumulative effect of more numerous, frequent and low-quality interactions with organisations can trap people in an environment where there is a stark imbalance of power and they do not have the capacity to fight their corner effectively. This can feel like having to constantly jump through hoops and being unable to solve your problems. It is demoralising and exhausting, especially when the people and systems you rely on actually disadvantage you and inadvertently stop you from bouncing back and moving forwards.
This could be because government debt collection will not take into account your circumstances or because social security is complex to navigate, or it is difficult to avoid pitfalls like overpayments, sanctions and administrative mistakes.
This is a big topic, and in this blog series we will begin to understand and explore real world experiences of officialdom. We’ll be looking at the cognitive impact of stress and crisis, as well as the impact when systems that you trust to look after you let you down. Finally, we’ll look at the self-perpetuating nature of officialdom and how it interacts with the poverty premium.
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Note: the statistics in this report are from a survey of 897 CAP debt help clients conducted online and by post between October and November 2020.
