Posted on 29 January 2025
Our Community and Social Impact Director, Felicity Hunt, discusses how providing essential household appliances can be a cost-effective way to prevent poverty and create lasting benefits.
Many charitable organisations continue to feel the challenges of Covid, inflation and the cost of living. It’s not just funding they need, but long-term support, partnership and capacity building to ensure they can continue to provide help where it’s needed most.
The last decade has been particularly challenging for the charity, community and voluntary sector. According to the School for Social Entrepreneurs1, small charities are facing a number of challenges: their overall income has fallen by a fifth, as costs have risen and pressure to support vulnerable people has grown in face of cuts to public spending.
We know life has got much harder for many people since 2020. Covid, inflation and the cost-of-living crisis (including rising energy costs) in the UK has seen poverty levels increase significantly.
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s UK Poverty 2024 report, in October 2023, 2.8 million households were in in arrears with household bills or behind on repayments, 4.2 million were going without essentials (heating, lighting clothing, shoes and basic toiletries) and 3.4 million households reported not having enough money for food.
Hyde Charitable Trust (HCT) has certainly seen an increase in Hyde customers’ demand for financial help over the last few years, with requests for food vouchers more than tripling and white goods requests going up by two-thirds. The amount of money we’ve given to customers has risen to levels we only previously saw during Covid, and has doubled since April 2021. Last year we made 1,599 grants that supported 1,263 Hyde customers (some received more than one grant) totalling £323,000.
Shopping vouchers were the single most requested support last year, with 845 vouchers worth £48,000 given to Hyde customers. Vouchers were overwhelmingly used to buy food and meant households could spend their income on other living costs – such as rent, energy bills and clothes – stopping things from getting worse and cutting the risk of them getting into more debt.
While vouchers tend to be needed in a crisis, the second most requested support last year –buying white goods – can have long term benefits. Living without appliances for cooking, washing and refrigeration can have significant financial impact.
According to the Association of Charitable Organisations (ACO) 2023 report: More than making do: understanding the economic impact of essential household appliances, an estimated 480,000 households, or 1.2 million people, in the UK are in ‘appliance poverty’ – they don’t have a washing machine or a fridge freezer. Of these, 53,000 households, or 130,000 people, have neither.
Having nothing to cook on means people are more likely to rely on takeaways, and relying on a microwave means people will need to buy more expensive (and often unhealthy) food, such as ready meals. Additionally, not having a fridge or a freezer means it’s more difficult to shop ‘smarter’ and save money on bulk food shopping. Another report from charity Turn2us (Living Without: The Scale and impact of appliance poverty), a family without these can expect to spend 43% more on an average food shop.
Turn2us says the cost of paying to clean clothes at a laundrette can be 2,500% more expensive than buying and running a washing machine, particularly for those families having to wash school uniforms and work clothes, or those living with medical conditions.
Providing these items means we’re not only supporting customers with the cost of the purchase, but also helping them reduce their overall outgoings. It can also help people afford other essential expenses.
By way of example, last year, one of Hyde’s customers, Ani (not her real name), a 20-year-old care leaver and single parent, was referred to us after moving into her social rent home with her young son. Ani was starting to struggle.
She owed about £1,000 in rent, and hadn’t been able to afford a cooker or a washing machine. She was relying on takeaways and ready meals, which were costing her a lot more money than preparing fresh food, and she was either relying on support from family and friends with washing machines or spending extra money on trips to the launderette.
As well as helping her get more benefits so she could pay her rent, Ani was awarded a grant to buy a washing machine and a cooker, saving her not only the cost of the items, but up to £3,300 a year on her laundry costs and cooking; money that can go on other living expenses.
Based on the findings of the Turn2us report, the combined annual savings of the 306 appliances HCT provided funding for in 2023/24 was at least £469,000. In terms of social impact, using the methodology in ACO’s report, the value of wellbeing improvements could be as much as £2.2m, or 11 times the cost of the appliances of £202k.
Since 2021, based on these calculations, we estimate Hyde customers provided with white goods have saved a combined £1.2m, with £5.3m in wellbeing improvements.
As the ACO report says: ‘With an estimated 480,000 households living in appliance poverty in the UK…the monetary value of wellbeing improvements arising from [being provided with] large essential appliances in the home could be as much as £6.7bn.”
Housing associations provide homes for some of the most vulnerable people in society – people already on low incomes, who need help and support in finding and living in a home of their own.
On top of this, the support systems housing associations provide can give a stable foundation to improve someone’s life in all aspects, including their finances, their physical and mental health, their relationships with others and their purpose in life. This delivers significant, long term, socio-economic benefits. Our own Value of Social Tenancy research estimates the total value brought by England’s social housing sector is at least £77.7bn a year.
So, along with short term financial help, one easy (and inexpensive) way of supporting people in the longer term is to give them the money to buy cookers, washing machines and fridge freezers – things many of us take for granted. This can help stop them getting into debt, help them sustain their tenancies and to thrive in their homes.
This article first appeared in Inside Housing on 28 January 2025.