Recap: Launching our new Strategy

In the shadow of Barbican’s brutalism, the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute recently launched its new strategy that will steer its work for the next five years.

It has been a year in the making and was co-produced with members from our dedicated Research Community, ensuring that the document is anchored in the raw realities of everyday life for those experiencing money and mental health problems.

This was a big moment for the charity. It was an opportunity to bring together influential stakeholders from the worlds of politics, regulation, essential services and support service, to share our vision and ambitions for the coming five years. It was also a chance to celebrate and thank our Research Community, trustees, advisors, funders, partners, and supporters. Collectively, they help to make everything we do possible.

The event was also an apt moment to look forward to the battles to come and problems to fix, as we reasserted our commitment to fighting for a world where the vicious cycle of money and mental health problems is broken.

We heard remarks from a stellar line up of speakers that included our founder and chair, Martin Lewis; our CEO, Helen Undy; Josh from our Research Community; Sarah Pritchard, an Executive Director at the Financial Conduct Authority; Vim Maru, CEO Barclays UK; Jasjyot Singh, CEO, Consumer Lending, Lloyds Banking Group; and Dame Clare Moriarty, Chief Executive of Citizens Advice.

For me, there were four key takeaways from the speeches:

Martin wasted little time in calling out council tax collection as the most “pernicious, nasty, badly designed and harmful form of debt collection” that can see people “within two weeks of missing one council tax payment, asked to pay for a year and then by six weeks having bailiffs at their door.”

It was, he said, “an abomination that constituents are treated worse than customers and it needs to change.”

It was a powerful message that resonated in the room and beyond, with the government only a week later announcing a plan to consult on making council tax collection fairer for people in debt. Whoever said policy campaigning doesn’t work!

As you may already know, Money and Mental Health now has super-complainant status. This enables us to raise complaints to the Competition and Markets Authority about consumer harms caused by market failures or behaviour by businesses in a range of sectors, such as consumer retail and energy. Or put more simply, having the power to escalate specific issues up the agenda.

It was noted by Martin at the event that this is a ‘kitemark recognition’ for the charity’s research quality and campaigning efforts, and that one prospective area of focus could be travel insurance. Attendees heard that there is a real problem in the sector with examples of people with bipolar being charged 28 times more.

A clearer focus of Money and Mental Health’s work over the coming years will be examining how technology can enable the best outcomes for people with mental health problems.

Helen explained that this would mean looking at “how can we use AI to automate things when we’re struggling to engage with our financial management”, but equally exploring “how that same AI is not used to automate the ads to target us when we’re most vulnerable and so we end up in more of a financial mess.”

Martin previously described Money and Mental Health as a ‘do tank’. That means we not only develop ideas and solutions backed by rigorous research and evidence, but then always strive to put them into action. That principle is the basis of our Mental Health Accessible (MHA) programme, through which we work directly with essential services providers to help them effectively support customers with mental health problems.

Lloyds Bank was the first firm we worked with, and it was great to hear from Jasjyot Singh about how that has helped the bank improve the service it offers customers with mental health problems, noting how becoming MHA-accredited had changed their culture systematically. 

Another great example of this ‘research into impact’ approach is our Gambling Harms Action Lab which involves a cohort of seven banks working with us over 18 months to improve what they are doing to tackle gambling harms.

We heard how that model is already yielding promising results with Vim Maru commenting that it has created a “space to share learnings from each other” and to “try stuff out and see what works”.

Separately, we heard from Martin that what matters is not so much the user experience but the user outcome. Our plan is to roll out the action lab model to look at different issues over the next few years.

You can read our new strategy here.