Here's an idea

Quite a lot of my clients live in rural areas of Shropshire and 90% of them don't have landlines. A handful have no mobile phone either.

I support vulnerable tenants who are on some sort of benefit – people on their first tenancy, young single parents, people with a mental disability and elderly people. If there is a phone box in their village, often it doesn't work.

If they need me, they should be able to just pick up the phone. Or if I'm driving to see a tenant in the middle of the countryside, I want to check they're going to be there.

I approached Vodafone with the idea that they donate some phones to us. They gave us six pay-as-you-go mobiles with £15 credit on each. They don't get anything in return apart from the publicity. The tenants then buy top-up vouchers. They can ring whoever they want – for isolated people, being able to keep in touch with your family and friends makes such a difference.

We've got to be able to trust the client to look after the phone: we draw up a contract to agree that if it is lost, broken or damaged, we will charge them. They can keep the phones for as long as they need before getting a landline sorted out. But they also have to realise we are only lending them the phone, and they can't keep it. We need the scheme to carry on, so we can help more than just six people.