When one unexpected cost tips the balance, and the system quietly keeps you there
By Richard Kirtley
I’ve been thinking about a number this week, not in any structured or analytical way, not trying to interrogate it or turn it into something neat and conclusive, but just letting it sit there in the background of my mind, returning to it every now and then, almost without meaning to. £0.98 a day. It’s such a small number on the face of it, the kind of thing that, if it appeared on a bank statement, most of us would barely register, let alone question. It doesn’t shout, it doesn’t alarm, it doesn’t demand attention. It just slips through, quietly absorbed into everything else. Yet, the more I’ve thought about it, the less small it has felt, because it isn’t really about the number itself, but about what sits behind it and what it represents.
It came from a conversation with someone we’ve recently supported, and while I’ll keep her anonymous, her situation is far from unusual, which is perhaps the most troubling part of all. She had been managing her finances carefully, not with any kind of comfort or surplus, but with balance, the kind of balance that is maintained through constant attention, where every outgoing is accounted for and nothing is left to chance. There’s something quite remarkable in that, I think, a kind of quiet discipline that rarely gets acknowledged but underpins so much of daily life for so many people. It isn’t flashy, it doesn’t show up in success stories, but it’s there, holding everything together, until something interrupts it.
In her case, it was damage to her home, a council property, something that wasn’t her fault but still became her responsibility to deal with, and with that came a cost that arrived without much room for negotiation or delay. It didn’t come at a time of her choosing, and it didn’t take into account whether there was space for it. It simply landed, directly into an account that didn’t have the capacity to absorb it, and that was enough to shift everything. That careful balance, held together over time, disappeared in a moment, not because of a pattern of behaviour or a series of poor decisions, but because of one event that could not have been planned for.
This, I think, is something we don’t always recognise clearly enough and it is how little it can take. There is often an assumption that financial difficulty builds slowly, that it is the result of trends or habits or misjudgements over time, and sometimes that is true, but just as often it isn’t. Sometimes it is simply a single moment, a single cost arriving at the wrong time in a system that has no spare capacity, and that is all it takes to tip someone from stability into something much more fragile.
She slipped into an unarranged overdraft, and from that point onwards something else began to happen, something much quieter, much less visible, but no less significant. The system began to respond, not in a way that announced itself or drew attention, but in a way that simply continued, steadily, consistently, applying a daily charge. £0.98 a day. Not enough to feel urgent, not enough to provoke immediate action, but enough to remain, enough to accumulate, and crucially, enough to make it harder to move back to where she had been. When there is no surplus income, when everything coming in is already committed elsewhere, there is no easy way to reverse that position. The overdraft doesn’t reduce, the charge doesn’t stop, and the distance back to balance slowly increases, day by day, almost imperceptibly at first, but steadily nonetheless.
What has stayed with me is not just that this happens, but how normal it feels, how easily it is accepted as part of the way things are. There is a statistic that was shared with me by Kanishka Narayan, now Labour MP for the Vale of Glamorgan, a while ago, but that I still find rather shocking. Around 11% of UK personal bank revenue comes from unarranged overdraft fees, with a further 5% from refused payment charges, and the more I have thought about this, especially in light of our borrowers predicament, the more it has shifted how I see this. It tells us that this isn’t incidental, it isn’t a byproduct or an occasional occurrence, it is part of the structure itself. It is built in, expected, relied upon. When something becomes structural in that way, it begins to shape the system around it, influencing how it behaves and, ultimately, how it responds to people when they find themselves in difficult positions.
There is something quite unsettling in that realisation, because it means that moments like this, moments of vulnerability, of being caught out, of something going wrong, are not just unfortunate events within the system, but are, in some sense, anticipated by it. Yet, when those moments arrive, the system does not pause or adapt or offer a different kind of response. It continues, applying cost in a way that is quiet enough not to draw attention, but persistent enough to matter, particularly for those who have the least room to absorb it.
In this case, we chose to respond differently, though in truth what we did was very simple. Alongside a small business start-up loan, we provided an even smaller additional loan at zero interest, not to drive growth or expansion, but simply to clear the overdraft and remove the daily charge that was holding her in place. There was nothing complex in that decision, no innovation or novelty, just a recognition that before anything else could happen, that pressure needed to be lifted. When it was, the effect was immediate, not because everything suddenly became easy, but because it stopped becoming harder. The daily extraction ceased, the compounding effect disappeared, and with it came a sense that movement, however gradual, was once again possible.
I keep coming back to how unremarkable that should feel, and yet how unusual it seems within the broader system. There is nothing radical about removing a harmful cost, nothing particularly bold about choosing not to charge interest in a situation like this, and yet it stands in contrast to a system that, in many cases, does the opposite. It raises questions, I think, not just about individual practices, but about the underlying logic that shapes them, about what we have come to accept as normal, and about whether that normality really serves the people within it.
When I think about that number now, £0.98 a day, it no longer feels small. It feels like a signal, a small, quiet indicator of something much larger, something about how we distribute risk, how we respond to vulnerability, and how we have designed systems that, in subtle ways, can make it harder for people to recover when things go wrong. If that is something we have designed, then it is also something we can choose to design differently, to build systems that do not simply continue when someone slips, but that recognise the moment and respond in a way that helps them find their footing again.
I don’t think it needs to be complicated, but I do think it needs to be intentional.