The real cost of Christmas

HOW much did Christmas cost you? That’s a real question, not some way of getting around to the old chestnut about how much more it cost God. Instead it’s a real question because, for very many people, the real cost of Christmas is calculated at the end of January when the dreaded credit card bill drops through the letter box or the overdraft limit hits the bufer. This is when Christmas has to be paid for and that’s OK if you’ve been in a position to budget for what lies ahead, but it is a living hell if it’s the last in a line of inancial pressures.

Did you know that almost a quarter of all households in Scotland (600,000) have no savings to fall back on? Many of these households are described as the ‘just about managing’ others are the working poor, some are even more disadvantaged than that and not enough is being done to protect those who ind themselves trapped in perpetual poverty. The dice is loaded against the most vulnerable in our society and there are many fronts on which the battle for a fair deal, a decent wage and a reasonable safety net has to be fought. One of them is in the world of high cost credit which simply magniies the problems faced by the poorest and most vulnerable. In 2016, up against the limits of inancial survival, 4.4m people in the UK borrowed £4.5bn from the high-cost payday, home credit and rent-to-own sectors of the money markets. In total they owed £8.8bn – almost twice what they had borrowed. At that time 8% of people in Scotland had high cost loans on their credit ile (the UK average is 6%) this rose to 12% in “G” postcodes. The poorest are paying the most for almost everything and that includes gas and electricity and credit. Those who can least aford are being commercially exploited by those who can most aford.

How we earn our money and how we spend it says more about who we are than most of the fine words we speak.

Most of you reading this article will have bank accounts and will never have encountered the egregious rates of interest charged by the payday lending or the rent to own retail market. These, sadly, have been the only alternatives available to those who have never had savings and then found that their short-term, small-sum loan has turned into a nightmare which has driven them to food banks, rent arrears, mental health issues and even suicide. Something has to be done about this because lives matter more than proit.

It is this imperative which led the Carnegie UK Trust into a project aimed at promoting the not-for-proit lending sector. Credit Unions and Community Development Finance Institutions are alternatives for those people who need to meet household emergencies, but who are otherwise excluded from mainstream inancial markets. The Carnegie Project has been joined by a Consortium led by the actor Michael Sheen which aims to bring an end to high cost credit by promoting the not for proit lending sector.

Social conscience and a kind of righteous anger lie behind this work; the Bible, from end to end, condemns the exploitation of the poor. How we earn our money and how we spend it says more about who we are than most of the ine words we speak. l can see Jesus upturning the tables of the moneylenders, not because money lending is intrinsically bad in itself, but because exploitation in any market is a sin and it’s usually a sin against the poor. I reckon that the church should spend less time discussing what people do in their bedrooms and gave more consideration to what people do with their money.

Meanwhile, if you have already tidied Christmas away and moved on, spare a thought for those who are just beginning to pay the bill.

Read more about the Carnegie Project at www.carnegie-uktrust.org.uk/project/afordable-credit