One minute, everything’s fine; you have a job, a girlfriend, a mortgage and a life. Then something happens that threatens all of it. You get a hernia. I’m a debt adviser and work with people who face life-destroying levels of debt, and this is one of the cases I’ve worked on over the years.
Jake, a fortysomething tradesperson, had been paying off his mortgage arrears for years. He was in fact a “mortgage prisoner”, unable to switch, and his mortgage had been sold to a high-interest charging company. After a year of steady payments, the company allowed Jake to capitalise the remaining arrears with a new mortgage product in October 2021.
A few weeks later, Jake started to experience pain in his groin and tests confirmed that he had developed a hernia and surgery was required. He joined a post-pandemic NHS waiting list, but kept working, as there’s no sick pay when you are self-employed. The pain got much worse. More tests established there was a second hernia. Jake was in agony, on serious painkillers. Carrying on working was no longer an option.
In February 2022, savings depleted, Jake claimed universal credit (UC). If you are too sick to look for work, you also have to claim the additional “limited capability” element, or you could be sanctioned for not meeting your “claimant commitment”. Another form, another assessment, more waiting.
The first UC payment takes five weeks, so Jake applied to his local household support fund for food bank and energy top-up vouchers, and received a three-week subscription to the Penny Pantry.
The Penny Pantry works like this: you pay £3.50 a week and you get to choose 10 items, including fresh fruit, bread and meat. The average value of the goods is about £25, so it’s great value.
The unwritten Penny Pantry rulebook is a must-read for newbies, so let’s quickly write it. Don’t turn up a couple of minutes before opening time. The queue will have been forming for hours and, with every person in front of you, the pickings get slimmer. You will be grateful whatever you get because it’s food, it’s cheap, and it will keep you alive, but do try to get there a couple of hours before it opens to have any hope of choice. Or, like Jake, you could end up with “depressing” tinned chilli which does nothing for your wellbeing.
Jake got his first UC payment of £311.30 in April. By then his mortgage had gone unpaid for three months. That same month saw energy prices increase. He spent £40 every week topping up his prepayment meters. More than half the UC was gone already, leaving £138 a month to cover his TV licence (£16), water (£15), travel costs for hospital and jobcentre appointments (£35), mobile phone (£20), and TV and internet (£45). This left him with £7 for food. For a month.
By June, Jake was still waiting for an operation and for his assessment to see if he was unfit for work. He also claimed personal independence payments (Pip) as his condition had limited his ability to live normally for six months. Both applications were rejected (eventually) with Jake found to be fit for work.
The following month, Jake had an operation. Unfortunately, after all that waiting, it wasn’t successful. More tests showed that one of the hernia repairs hadn’t worked, and he went straight back on another surgery waiting list.
Fast forward a couple of months and depression had swallowed Jake up. Friends weren’t around any more. Relationships suffered. It was lonely. Only the mortgage company regularly kept in touch. In November, Jake hit the magic nine months of claiming UC continuously to be eligible to apply for “support for mortgage interest” (SMI), a secured loan from the government to pay a percentage of your mortgage while you claim UC. The mortgage company was threatening to start repossession action due to arrears so these payments couldn’t come soon enough.
Jake completed the SMI application three times. The Department for Work and Pensions kept rejecting it because there were pages allegedly missing. It took another three months to establish that it was scanning duplex forms in single-sided, thereby losing half the application each time. (The mortgage company struggled to believe this.)
Twelve months on, Jake is still waiting for surgery, therapy, the results of benefit appeals and SMI payments. But he is still fighting.
Hernias should not become disabilities; they should not make you severely depressed, ruin your social life and jeopardise the roof over your head. But this is England in 2023. The welfare state isn’t a safety net that catches us when we fall on hard times; it’s cheap tissue that you plunge straight through before hitting the ground.
Don’t rely on the system you have paid into for so many years. Don’t think about the incompetence and indifference of those whom you may have to rely on: the people who wield all of the power and never have to visit a Penny Pantry. And don’t, whatever you do, get a hernia.
Amy Taylor is a debt adviser and chair of Greater Manchester Money Advice Group
Jake’s name has been changed
