Are we credit scoring, or adversity scorning?

In December, Shyamantha Asokan wrote an article for Working Mums, sharing my story of how I pulled myself out of poverty and how I now help other single mums through the Single Mums Business Network [SMBN]. A link to that article is here.

I briefly talked about how the lack of flexible working affected my income and credit score, and how that has fuelled my work to address barriers to work, homes and finance for my single parent community, but in truth, the issues I raise affect all primary carers, who, by needing to be in two places at once, face barriers that have disastrous consequences.

Whist the issue of flexible working and childcare reform is well underway, we still have a long way to go to ensure that careers can continue when we have dependents, whether by age or disability, and we still carry the burden of debt, induced by professional barriers.

If you are in a relationship, it may be that with dependents, one full-time salary is enough to cover the basic overheads, and whilst uncomfortable, it is private; but when you do not have a partner’s income you have to turn to the welfare state, which is a truly traumatising process, from the interviews to the threat of sanctions and, of course, the constant search for a way to work around childcare and generate the much needed full-time income. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation offer fantastic insight into our ineffective benefit system.

Unconscious bias

Before I became a single mum, I too was affected by unconscious bias: I had an image in my head of what a single mum looked like and what her lifestyle choices might be. I will always be ashamed of this, as once I began socialising in single parent groups, I realised that we were all intelligent, clean, hard-working women, with polite and happy children. Most of us had been married, some widowed, some assaulted, some cheated on, some just unhappy with the child’s father and choosing a happier home, but we were all happy now, just frustrated with the barriers to continue professional progression.

With this new negative income and quest to make work work, you enter the expensive world of being poor, with higher APR loans, adversely affected credit scores as you are constantly juggling which bills to pay each month, and higher fees for paying monthly instead of annually, and charges for hardship, significantly increasing dues as you are fined monthly for being destitute. It is a pretty cruel system when you are fighting so hard.

When you do eventually increase your income, through finding the flexible work or growing the business, you are still paying high interest loans back, and more often these days still paying high private rents, building the estate of another instead of your own, and this is where society falls short on enabling consolidation, to reduce outgoings and overall APR liability, and enabling you to save for a mortgage deposit, or obtain a mortgage to pay into your own estate. By being unable to consolidate your outgoings remain high, and your ability to repay, and enjoy disposable income or pay household bills annually to save increased rates, remains low.

It makes complete sense that your credit score would assess affordability to ‘increase’ outgoings, but when you are looking to ‘decrease’ them, or looking to pay at an equal rate, mortgage instead of rent, this should be a completely different measure.

Lack of support for women in business

The serious issue for women in business is that whilst so many mainstream banks promote supporting women in business, they do not support in adversity, or I should say, women who have ‘experienced’ adversity. If your credit score says no, so do they, locking you into destitution and blocking your ability to work your way out of it via viable enterprise. If you make a claim; say, if you were in the diet industry and you claimed to help people lose weight, you would have to offer stats, to say something like ‘7 out of 10 women lose 50Ib in a month’, but banks do not have to show how many women they help vs how many women they hinder. What are the real stats around lending? And why are we not reporting on the amount of women rejected.

Equally, as a single parent, you are not a protected characteristic, and so you do not benefit from tailored support for other minority groups based on race, sexuality, religion and so on. We are not represented as being represented, or included, we are not protected by any equal opportunity law.

At least, not yet!

*To read more about the SMBN and our work addressing barriers to work, homes and finance, you can visit our website, Single Mums Business Network [SMBN] [CIC] – Helping Single Mums with Work, Enterprise and Wellbeing.

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