Crisis payments are intended to meet occasional or short-term needs and can't be used to give someone an alternative source of regular income. They offer support to low-income households who have experienced financial shock. A financial shock is a sudden, unexpected expense or drop in income, that can place pressure on someone’s budget and wellbeing.
What we'll ask you when you call
We'll gather some basic information from you about your circumstances (including your household, your income and savings) and will ask you what help you need.
We’ll also ask you to send in your most recent bank transaction statements for each account you hold. This helps us to prove your identity, understand what essential costs you're struggling to pay for and why, and to signpost you to support that may be available to you. If you don’t provide this information, your application will be closed as incomplete.
Crisis payment eligibility
When considering a crisis payment application, we'll define low income as a household whose income doesn't cover their essential expenditure costs.
Where a household contains other adults, we'll expect them to contribute towards household costs.
We'll take a person-centred approach to establishing eligibility. Examples of a crisis where we might be able to help will be linked to some sort of financial shock.
For example (this list isn't exhaustive):
- A reduction in regular income (redundancy, significant change in working pattern)
- An unexpected sudden reduction in benefits
- A car breaking down or a bus route being cut (or some other transport change)
- An essential item or household appliance breaking down (boiler, medical equipment or white goods)
- A disaster, such as fire, flood, gas explosion, chemical leak, landslip etc
- An accident, health emergency, mental health crisis leading to additional unplanned expenditure
- Domestic abuse resulting in additional expenditure
Please note that we may ask to see proof of the above.
What happens once you've made your application?
We use a person-centred approach. This means we'll consider your individual circumstances to identify your needs.
We may ask you to provide a budget sheet to establish whether you need help. If you ask us, we can provide you with a budget sheet. Alternatively, you may prefer to use the budget planner from Money Helper.
We'll also consider what money you have available to you. For this purpose, you'll need to provide your most recent bank statement for each account you and your partner (if you have one) have, whether your account is in credit or debit. This also includes savings accounts. This proof should be up to the current date that you make your application if possible. If you have other accounts, such as ISAs, we may need to see proof of those too.
Please note that in some circumstances we may ask for bank proof for other members of the household where we would expect them to contribute towards the cost of the item(s) being requested.
We may ask for other evidence, depending on your circumstances and the item(s) you're requesting.
Once we’re received the evidence we asked you to provide when you made your application, a specialist adviser will contact you to gather more information. They may ask you for other information or evidence, depending on your circumstances. If you’ve applied to us before, we may ask you to provide a budget form showing all the money you have coming in and the money you must pay out.
We'll take your individual circumstances into account when looking at your application. If you have a support worker, it can be helpful to ask them to give us a letter or email confirming your situation, as they can sometimes provide us with more background information to support your application. This can help us to understand your situation more fully.
How do we make our awards?
If we decide to make an award, it will depend on the type of award you need and how urgently you need the help. We'll discuss this with you when dealing with your application. We'll notify you of our decision, and if we're unable to make an award, we'll explain why.
Right to ask for a review
Local welfare provision schemes, including crisis payments, are discretionary, and as such there's no right of appeal to a social security tribunal.
You can ask us to conduct an internal review (look at our decision again) if you disagree with it, if you think we haven't taken something into account or if you have new information that you think would be helpful to us. If you want to ask for a review, you need to do this in writing, within one month of the date of the decision letter we send to you. You can do this by emailing localsupport@shropshire.gov.uk, as your request will reach us quicker by email.
If you're unable to do this, you can write to us at:
- Welfare Support Team, Shropshire Council, PO Box 4826, SHREWSBURY, SY1 9LJ. Your decision letter will provide you with more information on this.
If we're unable to change our decision, you can choose the route of judicial review.