FEELING THE BENEFIT

From managing hotels to helping people with their benefits – it’s been something of a career shift for Kellie Appleyard.

But Middlesbrough Council’s benefits operations manager says that at the heart of both roles is a desire to help people – and rarely has that been more needed than during a cost-of-living crisis affecting so many.

Middlesbrough-born mum-of-two Kellie spent several years as a hotel manager in the likes of Manchester, High Wycombe, Oxford and Hereford.

But on returning to Teesside in 2020, initially joining the council as a council tax advisor, she’s now part of a senior team that devises how the authority operates its various systems of support.

Explaining her role, she said: “I oversee the benefits team who are looking at people from a housing benefit point of view – council tax reductions, discretionary housing payments and welfare rights. It’s about maximising people’s benefits and making sure they’re getting the right levels of entitlement, especially if their circumstances change.”

Most recently, that’s meant allocating the £1.653m Middlesbrough received from the Government’s Household Support Fund (HSF) – extra post-Covid funding to help those who need it most with such things as energy costs, utility bills, council tax and food.

And in the New Year, for the first time, it will be open to people who don’t automatically receive a payment through their benefits status.

Kellie said: “We give a lot of support to people who receive benefits, because they have the lowest income. But we’ve found there’s a lot of people just over the threshold for receiving benefits but who are also struggling financially now and could even end up losing their homes because of spiking costs of mortgages and fuel.”

Kellie feels the council takes an enlightened approach to how the HSF money is allocated.

She explained: “Some councils will look at people on benefits or council tax reduction and just make payment direct to them, and that’s it. We take a different approach in Middlesbrough –we do a bit of that but have combined it with application processes to hopefully allow more people to qualify or apply for support.

“The government guidelines on the last HSF scheme concentrated on pensioners and families. Pensioners don’t traditionally engage with us through online forms and so we wrote to several thousand to advise them that they may qualify and tried to get them to respond, and about 50% did.

“Money then went to families in receipt of income based free school meals, which applies to more than 9,000 children in Middlesbrough or people in receipt of council tax reduction – that could be single people, couples or families.

“There’ll be another HSF scheme starting in April so as we’re going through this one, we can collate data and review the feedback of who we’ve paid or couldn’t pay, so that if someone has

How a desire to help drives benefit manager Kellie’s approach

applied and has been refused, we can look at why and see if we can build that into the next scheme.”

Kellie says her department works with other council departments and partner organisations – foodbanks, warm spaces, housing providers, even a financial inclusion group – to ensure benefit recipients get as much help and advice as possible.

And at the heart of it all, she says, is a desire to ensure no one misses out on what they’re entitled to.

She said: “We are trying to provide support to as many people as we can. A criticism of some councils can be that they tend to give money to the same people and don’t look at how to support others, but that’s not the case with Middlesbrough.

“Working in hotel management was all about looking after people and making sure they had a good experience – this is similar, looking after the residents of Middlesbrough.

“I enjoy looking at how we can help people – looking at different ways, different strategies, and just trying to get the residents of Middlesbrough as much support as possible.

“As a mum and resident of Middlesbrough I understand the impact the current price rises are having and I’m not immune to them. I want to use my personal experiences and what I see with friends and family, as well as the feedback received from customers in general to ensure support can be provided to everyone that needs it.”

For more information on the HSF visit middlesbrough.gov.uk/household-support-fund