Poverty is not merely a crisis of income – it is the consequence of a fragmented public service system that has become adept at managing crises but chronically ineffective at preventing them.
The UK has no shortage of strategies, consultations, and funding commitments. Yet, despite billions of pounds invested in tackling child poverty, boosting employment, and reducing economic inactivity, outcomes for too many families remain stubbornly poor. Emergency spending soars, while the structural drivers of poverty, unstable housing, mental health crises, and digital exclusion, remain largely unaddressed.
The issue is not that policymakers are unaware of the challenges. It is that the system itself is structured to react, not resolve. We have built a labyrinth of services, each addressing a single need: one agency for housing, another for health, another for skills. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable are left to navigate the gaps. The result is a cycle of missed opportunities, escalating crises, and mounting costs.
At the Wise Group, a leading social enterprise working with families in poverty, our front-line data underscores a grim reality.
For example:
• Households experiencing energy insecurity are 1.5 times more likely to require financial assistance, housing support, and physical health interventions.
• Those facing poor mental health and housing instability see a 60 per cent reduction in their prospects for sustainable employment without coordinated intervention.
On average, the families we support require help across eight distinct areas, with nearly a third needing support in ten or more. Poverty is interconnected. Our public services, however, are not.
Despite an ecosystem of well-intentioned initiatives, public services remain a patchwork of siloed interventions, each designed to address one aspect of deprivation without accounting for the rest. The price of this fragmentation is paid in spiralling emergency costs from crisis accommodation to A&E admissions to lost employment opportunities.
The UK cannot afford to continue funding dysfunction. We need a system that prioritises outcomes over processes, prevention over reaction, and integration over fragmentation.
A model that simply manages poverty is a policy failure. The imperative now is to end it. This demands a radical rethinking of how we design, fund and measure public services.
Four principles must guide this transformation:
1. Integration: health, housing, employment and education must be coordinated around the household, not the bureaucracy. Fragmentation is costly, financially and socially.
2. Relational investment: transactions do not drive change. Trust does. Services must invest in building relationships that deliver lasting impact.
3. Impact measurement: funding must be tied to outcomes, not activity. Governments must assess sustained improvements in well-being, resilience and employment stability – not throughput statistics.
4. Invest to save: prevention is not a cost. It is a fiscal imperative. Up-front investment in integrated services can reduce emergency spending and strengthen the economic base.
The Wise Group has spent over four decades working alongside families in poverty, refining and scaling a model that moves beyond crisis management to deliver sustainable change: Relational Mentoring.
Our Mentors, many with lived experience, build trusted, enduring relationships with families, helping them navigate a complex web of services. They provide a single, coherent pathway across housing, health, employability and financial support. Progress is systematically tracked across 15 interconnected areas of need, from mental health to financial security.
This is not theory or a pilot. It is a tested, scalable model delivering measurable outcomes. In our most recent data, families receiving Relational Mentoring demonstrated:
• A 25 per cent increase in income within 12 months of engagement.
• A 30 per cent reduction in crisis interventions such as emergency housing.
• A 40 per cent increase in sustainable employment placements.
This is public service reform in action, a model that meets people where they are, addresses multiple needs simultaneously, and follows through until stability is achieved.
Together with Aberlour Children’s Charity, we are now scaling this Whole Family Pathway to Sustainable Employment. This model integrates employability support, Relational Mentoring, and wraparound family services, targeting the most vulnerable households: lone parents, minority ethnic families, families with disabled members and those with young children.
The opportunity to prevent poverty is real. The data supports it. The question is whether the political will exists to implement it at scale.
For too long, the public sector has operated in silos, with agencies managing one crisis at a time and politicians touting short-term fixes. But the economic case for prevention is clear. Targeted, integrated services can break the cycle of poverty, reduce emergency spending, and generate economic value.
The UK government has a choice: continue funding a broken system that processes people through fragmented services or invest in integrated, relational, outcome driven models that prevent crises and empower households.
We already know who poverty hits hardest: lone parents, minority ethnic families, families with disabled members. They don’t need another assessment. Another referral. Another fragmented pilot.
They need trusted, relentless, local support, and they need it now. Poverty is not inevitable. But funding systems that manage it rather than end it is a choice. It is time to stop managing poverty. It is time to start ending it.
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