London & Quadrant Housing Trust has launched a range of financial services including credit cards and insurance targeted at people excluded from high-street banking.
L&Q, Barclays, Lloyds TSB and the Housing Corporation have invested a total of £250,000 in a one-year pilot scheme called Change – the first of its kind in London.

A Salford University survey of London housing association residents in March 2002 showed that a quarter had no bank account and more than half had no savings.

In order to address this, services including credit and debit cards, low-cost insurance, savings accounts and small business loans will be offered to tenants of L&Q and Family Housing Association via an arrangement with a south London credit union.

The Change scheme will begin in Southwark, Enfield, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Greenwich this year.

L&Q will invest a further £1m in the scheme when it is rolled out across London in 2004, and is looking for more backers.

Income from the project will be invested in large-scale regeneration projects, low-level personal lendingand other community finance projects.

David Montague, group finance director of the Change scheme, said: "To create sustainable communities you have to invest in more than bricks and mortar – it's about investing in communities and encouraging those communities to become self-sustaining in the long term."

A toolkit to help housing associations set up similar schemes was published this week by Salford University. The university also published an evaluation of England's other three community reinvestment trusts, in Blackburn, Portsmouth and Salford. It concluded that the services were succeeding in reaching people on low incomes who had used moneylenders in the past.

Source

Housing Today