Speedy cash or moral cash?
My friend in North-East London had an envelope put through his door recently, unmarked except for the small words ‘Speedy Cash’ on the front. And when he opened it he found a number of flyers for the payday lender Speedy Cash advertising the many different ways you can borrow money from them at over 2000 per cent APR. But alongside these flyers he found something altogether more sinister - a children’s colouring picture of the Speedy Cash mascot – a cartoon Kangaroo - ‘Speedy Roo.’
These kind of grim advertising tactics from payday lenders encapsulate the reason why we need the Church Credit Champions Network. We all have to borrow and save at different points in our life and the economic situation in the UK at the moment means that more and more people are having to borrow small amounts for unforeseen situations – maybe a washing machine or a car breaking, or an emergency trip.
With the rise of payday lending from a £300 million industry in 2006 to a £3.7 billion industry today, we’ve seen the huge profits that can be made by exploiting people in these circumstances and encouraging irresponsible lending at the same time.
Many of those we’ve spoken to in churches end up at places like Speedy Cash because they think they have no other choice, but that’s not the case. In most places in England, they will have access to a credit union – a local, mutual business that encourages savings and offers affordable short-term loans. In some places there are also growing social enterprises seeking to meet people’s credit needs in a responsible way. The problem is that these organisations simply don’t have the advertising budgets to compete with the likes of Speedy Cash.
That’s where the Church comes in. Local congregations have everything needed to develop the capacity and pres- ence of responsible lenders like credit unions. They have people that want to save money ethically. They have people that need to borrow money and will pay it back. They have people with time and skills to volunteer, buildings in the heart of local communities and networks of relationships with local employers. Most importantly, they have a long-term commitment to the common good of their community.
The purpose of the Church Credit Champions Network is to be a bridge between these many resources and the community finance sector. We aim to build relationships with credit unions and social enterprises in order to understand their current capacity and their needs. We’ll also work with local churches to identify and train ‘Credit Champions’ to take positive action – everything from telling their friends about the credit union to setting up a community bank in their church building. We will start that process in the Dioceses of Southwark and London and next year in Liverpool.
Our aims are threefold. Firstly to increase the number of churches engaging with issues of money in their community. We believe that effective action should always start with listening, and so we won’t be waltzing into any church and telling them what the problems are in their community and what they need to do about it. Instead we’ll help them to listen to the experiences of their members and neighbours in terms of money, and particularly the institutions through which people borrow and save.
From this process we will identify clergy and lay leaders to train as ‘Credit Champions’. And then we will help these Credit Champions to lead church-based action to promote responsible borrowing and saving. Examples like Murston Community Bank in All Saints in Kent and St James’, Clapton in Hackney show what can be possible with some willing volunteers and a passion for the local community. The Network is not your usual top-down target-driven approach to solving problems. We believe that the best way to harness the energy and resources of local churches is to work from the bottom up and to add skills and connections to help local people have maximum impact. But that means we need to test things out and see what works well and what doesn’t, and so we’ll be doing that in the first stage of the Network. Then we hope to roll things out more widely in partnership with the Archbishop’s Task Group and the Church Urban Fund’s Together Network. But the resources to run the Seeing Change course and hold Money Talks will be available very soon on the CTC website for anyone in the country who wants to get involved.