“Does it just mean that I’m in a sticky situation?” Rachel Sherman, mother of four, asks, wondering if her household classifies as a just-about-managing family, or in the dispiriting new political acronym, a Jam.
She is in a difficult situation financially, but questions whether the family should be described as just about managing, or more realistically, as one that is teetering on the edge of catastrophe, a Toteoc, or as one which is not OK by any stretch of the imagination, a Nobasoti (neither expression yet in political usage).
She is due to start a new job this week in a furniture shop, but has only been given an eight-hour-a-week contract, which leaves her and her husband (struggling to find work after a heart attack) with a huge shortfall, since the lowering of the overall benefit cap earlier this month reduced her housing benefit payments from about £640 a month to 50p.
It is not yet clear how they will manage. She forced a smile when each of her children had to take in a £1 donation last Friday for Children in Need, eating into the small pot now set aside for food. “Our whole family as a unit is in need,” she says. “I agree with the idea of people getting off benefits and into work; I understand and that’s right, but this pressure is making it harder. My husband has applied for well over 100 jobs this month, and he can’t get an interview.”
From the bottom of the income scale to families with a reasonably good income who are still struggling, a wide spectrum of families in Birmingham are hoping that they might be the just-about-managing families that Theresa May and Philip Hammond have in their sights for extra support in the autumn statement. Expectation is huge, and the disappointment is set to be palpable.
The constituency of Erdington voted strongly Brexit in the EU referendum and is one of the poorest in the country, with pockets of acute deprivation. Because of its location close to the Jaguar Land Rover Castle Bromwich site, it also has relatively well-paid workers, many of whom are finding that wage stagnation and rising living costs have also left them in difficulty.
Lauren Hampshire, 28, employed here as a family support worker, is capable, ambitious, professional and stuck. With a degree and postgraduate qualifications in early-years education, she works full-time, helping families who need advice with parenting and budgeting. Meanwhile, at home, she is worrying about her own budgeting issues as she tries to keep up mortgage payments and pay for nursery for her 18-month-old son.
“I did my education, I’ve bought a house, I’ve tried to do it all the right way, but there isn’t a lot of support when you’re left as a single parent. I’m just getting through each week, trying to manage,” she says. Planned local authority cuts for 2017 mean her job in the Castle Vale children’s centre is under threat, as the council decides which children’s services to shut down.
“I feel there is nowhere for me to go, there is no ladder for me to climb up. Nursery schools and children’s centres are at risk of closing and if they don’t actually close, they are at risk of massive budget reductions. Staff will be lost,” she says. “If I lost my job it would be devastating. I could apply for other jobs, but it is hard, because everyone is looking for budget cuts in this line of work so everyone is in the same boat, including management. If you think about it too much you can get quite down about it.”
For the moment she is just about managing by being careful not to buy new clothes for herself and by eating meals at her parents’ house whenever they are offered.
Clare Yates, 30, who has two daughters, one 14 months and the other three years old, is also hoping for more help with childcare costs. She lost her job with a catering company contracted to make breakfast for Jaguar workers when she was pregnant with her second child. “They said I wasn’t up to standard, that I was working too slowly, but I think they wanted me out because I was pregnant,” she says. Worries about her family’s financial situation have recently pushed her to ask her doctor for antidepressants, which she says are helping with the anxiety. “I worry about money all the time. It would help if there was more free childcare, so I could go back to work.”
Fifty-year-old Anne (who asked for her real name not to be published, because she was uneasy about talking about her financial predicament), a senior teaching assistant in Erdington who has worked in the same nursery school for 27 years, is also finding keeping up with her mortgage payments difficult. She extended the mortgage twice to meet household bills as she brought up three children, the youngest of whom is 16.
She recently received a letter from the bailiffs over costs related to late payment of council tax, and although she has decided to ignore it, the worrying memory of the letter keeps popping back into her mind. She has considered taking up a second job, but her hours at school are already quite long. She loves her job and is puzzled that, given how crucial the work is, her pay (more than £20,000) leaves her barely managing at all.
“I’m up at 6am and usually at work until five. At the end of the day you have to sleep,” she says. “I do struggle on what I get. I live in my overdraft, which is ridiculous. The wages come in, and the overdraft gets paid off and there’s nothing left. We haven’t been on holiday for five or six years because there hasn’t been extra money. We go to the market now to buy trainers, not to JD’s. I buy ‘smart price’, own-brand cornflakes, rather than Kellogg’s, and I still get to the checkout and think, ‘That’s come to a lot again.’”
She says her salary hasn’t risen much in a decade – “You don’t notice your annual increment, it’s just pennies” – and she also worries that her job will be at risk next year with the next round of council cuts threatening nursery services.
In central Birmingham, at the National Express depot, senior skilled workers, whose wages used to put them automatically in a comfortable bracket, are also considering whether their current income makes them the kind of workers that the prime minister wants to offer extra support.
Peter (also not his real name, because he was worried about saying anything that might upset his employer) has been working for the company as an engineer for more than three decades since he was a teenage apprentice. He says his £12-an-hour rate no longer goes as far as it once did. He is grateful to bosses who this year allowed him to increase his overtime schedule so he now works Saturdays and Sundays to boost his take-home pay – he never previously had to work both days of the weekend. “I work hard, but the family struggles when you work weekends,” he says. A father of two whose wife works part-time in a shop, he has only been able to meet his mortgage payments because he puts in long hours and works antisocial shifts.
He voted leave in the referendum, concerned about the impact of immigration. “I haven’t got a problem with immigrants. I’m all for getting people into this country who will make a difference, but you shouldn’t go flooding the country, otherwise schools and hospitals won’t be able to cope,” he says. A Labour voter, he is not expecting much from the autumn statement, but he wishes the government would speed up the implementation of Brexit. “In a democracy, don’t you go with the majority?”
