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Homeless people will for the first time be able to open accounts with the UK’s five biggest banks, in a pilot scheme marking the launch of the government’s financial inclusion strategy.
The Treasury said its new national plan was meant to ensure financial services “worked for everyone”, as it also revealed programmes that could help rebuild the credit scores of domestic abuse victims, support families with no savings and roll out financial education in primary schools across the UK.
One of the key schemes will see the high street lenders Lloyds, NatWest, Barclays, Nationwide and Santander waive the need for people to have a fixed address in order to open a bank account. The move will help vulnerable people avoid the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a bank account to apply for work and rental accommodation across the UK.
It will involve partnerships with the homelessness charity Shelter, which will vouch for prospective customers based on information on the charity’s database, while accompanying individuals to face-to-face meetings at a local bank branch. The scheme expands on a partnership with HSBC, which has opened 7,000 accounts for people experiencing homelessness since its start in 2019.
The City minister, Lucy Rigby, said: “This plan is about opening doors – helping people experiencing homelessness into work, helping survivors of abuse rebuild their credit and helping families save for a rainy day.
“No one should be locked out of the chance to build a better future. Our strategy gives people the tools to get on and boosts the economy by supporting more people back into work.”
The Treasury said it was also rolling out plans to help victims of domestic abuse repair credit ratings that have been damaged as a result of perpetrators having forced partners to take on debt on their behalf.
Credit agencies including Experian, Equifax and TransUnion will start reviewing how they could rescore victim’s credit ratings, before reporting back to government. Charities said it would give survivors a fair chance to rebuild their financial independence.
“For far too long, domestic abusers have stolen victim-survivors’ futures – forcing them into debt and destroying their credit scores with life-shattering consequences,” said Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the Surviving Economic Abuse charity.
“This strategy provides a golden opportunity to help survivors rebuild their lives by restoring their credit scores. It’s one we must seize so that credit reports reflect victim-survivors’ creditworthiness, not the economic abuse they have experienced.”
The financial inclusion strategy, which follows a years-long review by a Treasury-led financial inclusion committee, is aimed at boosting support for vulnerable people who have struggled to access banking and build financial resilience.
It comes as statistics reveal that more than 11.5 million people in the UK have less than £100 in savings, severely reducing their ability to recover from emergencies and unexpected costs such as boiler breakdowns or an extended illness.
The Treasury’s strategy will also look at how to provide support for employers hoping to offer payroll savings schemes, where money is automatically deducted from wages and placed into an accessible savings pot on the workers’ behalf before it hits their main bank accounts.
While the Treasury said these schemes have been popular with workers, some companies have been reluctant to take part for fear of inadvertently breaching minimum wage laws. The government said it would be “providing them with the certainty they need through the strategy to roll out such schemes far and wide”.
Ministers said they would also inject financial education into the national curriculum as part of broader reforms announced by the Department for Education (DfE). Teachers will soon be teaching key financial concepts such as calculating interest as part of the maths curriculum, followed by additional financial literacy in a new compulsory “citizenship” course.
The DfE said it would ensure that primary pupils learned more about “fundamentals of money, recognising that children are now consumers often before they reach secondary school”.
