Illness equals debt. Have we started accepting this as an inevitability?

By Grace Brownfield, Senior Public Policy Advocate

Two in five vulnerable people we helped last year said the main reason for falling into debt was illness. For certain conditions, like cancer and terminal illness, this figure was even higher — 68% and 77% respectively.

Our new report, Breaking the link: A closer look at vulnerable people in debt, reveals the clear link between getting ill, or facing other vulnerable situations, and falling into debt.

If I’m really honest, my first thought when I saw the figures above was to think it was obvious that this would be the case.

After all, I was well used to these figures; having previously worked at a cancer charity, I was fully aware of the financial difficulties that being ill can bring.

But then I stopped and thought about it: Why wasn’t I shocked? When did it become inevitable that illness equals financial problems, and bad ones at that?

Vulnerable people in debt

In 2017 our vulnerable clients had lower incomes on average, were more likely to have a negative budget (meaning they had less money coming in than they had going out), and to be behind on every single household bill.

They were less likely to be working than clients who weren’t vulnerable, yet when they received benefit income, two in five of them still didn’t have enough money to make ends meet.

Now, some could argue this is all just one big coincidence, that our clients with illnesses and other vulnerabilities just happened to have financial difficulties. But that’s not what the evidence shows. The reasons for debt, mentioned above, show the central role illness plays.

Meanwhile, research by Macmillan Cancer Support found that every year almost 400,000 people living with cancer in the UK struggle to pay their household bills, purely as a result of their diagnosis[i], and people experiencing mental health problems are three times as likely to be in problem debt[ii].

In the UK, we assume that people will be able to cover at least their essential expenditure, and when things happen that make it difficult for them to do so, such as falling ill, we assume they’ll be given the right support to help make ends meet.

Yet our analysis, along with a whole host of other evidence, raises significant questions about whether that’s happening, and whether the safety net, from the welfare system and elsewhere, is sufficient. Or, are there simply too many holes in it that people are falling through?

The freeze on working age benefits, the changes to welfare (including under Universal Credit), and the lack of savings among large parts of the population may all be leaving people without the resilience to cope with what they’re facing.

My fear is that we’ve now got so much evidence about the link between illness and debt that it seems like an inevitability: a problem too big to solve. But, of course, we all know it’s not.

What can be done?

It’s pretty straightforward: Make benefits work as they were supposed to — as an effective safety net — so when people fall ill or face difficult times, it’s there to help.

Make sure benefits keep up with the cost of living, so people actually have enough to cover the basics. Help people to build up savings to dip into when they need it, and make sure products and services can be adapted when people’s circumstances change unexpectedly, especially situations that make them more vulnerable to harm.

With political will we could do it. But we’ll have to keep calling it out. Let’s be outraged whenever people who are unwell, or have other vulnerabilities, don’t get the support they need to keep them from financial harm.

And similarly, where being in debt affects people’s health and wellbeing, we should be clear about how and why that’s happening, and call for it to stop.

Let’s not see either of these as inevitable consequences of each other, but the result of a system that isn’t working. Because, as worrying as that might be, it also means we can change it. We just have to get on with it.

To read more about our findings on clients with vulnerabilities, read our full Breaking the Link briefing.

[i] Macmillan Cancer Support (2017) No Small Change

[ii] Jenkins R et al. Debt, income and mental disorder in the general population. Psychological Medicine 2008; 38; 1485–1493