Fair for You’s Food Club and Shopping Card trials

• Description of the programme
• The study
• Key findings
• Points to consider

Description of the programme

The aim of the programme was to respond to the difficulties faced by low-income households in meeting the costs of food and other essentials, particularly in light of the cost-of-living crises and dramatic increase in the use of food banks.

Fair For You is an online Community Interest Company lender. The majority of Fair for You’s customers are women, with children, living in social housing. 60% of customers are lone parents, and nearly two thirds of these are entirely reliant on social security benefits. Many customer households also contain someone with a long-term health condition or disability.

Two small-value credit products were offered throughout the UK, via Fair For You , as part of a trial. The Food Club, a new product for new Fair For You customer for use in Iceland, offered £25-£75 credit, with top-up credit available and repayments set at £10 per week. The Shopping Card, a card that was already available for use with more retailers with credit limits up to £350, was extended to existing Fair For You customers who were also Iceland customers. The Shopping Card was repayable weekly, fortnightly, four-weekly or monthly at the customers preference with the largest loans repaid over 52 weeks. The headline APR for both products was 55.6%.

Some 6,104 customers were invited to take part in the study, implying that the programme reached at least this many people.

The study

The programme was evaluated using online surveys with 1,400 Fair For You customers who were also Iceland shoppers, from across the UK. Three online surveys were conducted: a baseline survey when the product was initially taken out, between July and November 2021; a follow-up survey after around 6 months for customers completing the baseline survey; a retrospective survey after 6 months for customers not responding to the baseline survey. The overall response rate for completing any survey was 24%, reducing to 9% for completion of either the follow-up or retrospective surveys, and response rates overall for the Food Club customers (who also had higher rates of financial pressures prior to product use) were lower than Shopping Card customers.

The research questions encompassed whether: customers felt that the products were helpful; experienced problems with the products and how these were resolved by Fair for You; households’ financial pressures, including whether their need to use food banks reduced; customers diets improved; customers experienced any wider health and well-being outcomes.

Weighting of the data was not undertaken to correct for non-response or differential response along demographic and socio-economic characteristics, although it was used to correct for ‘heavier’ credit use.

Key findings

• The products were helpful: 90% of Food club customers and 93% of Shopping Card customers said they found the products ‘really helpful’. This was based on the follow-up survey only (max. 223 customers).
• Problems experienced with the products: 15% of Food Club customers and around one quarter of Shopping Card customers said they experienced problems. This mostly related to external financial shocks affecting repayment.
• How problems were resolved by Fair for You: A half of Food
• Club customers experiencing problems said they had contacted Fair for You about their problem, and 70% of these said Fair for You’s response to their problem was “excellent” or “good”. Two-thirds of Shopping Card customers who experienced problems said they reported it and of these 98% found Fair for You’s response “excellent” or “good”.
• Household financial pressures, including the need to use food banks: 44% of Food Club and 70% of Shopping Card customers improved since baseline in relation to borrowing from friends and family to pay for essentials.
  • 71% of Food Club and 63% of Shopping Card customers improved in relation to falling behind with key household bills.
  • More than a half of each customer group who had previously used food banks said that they had now stopped.
• Improved diets: About two thirds of each customer group reported their diets had improved ‘a lot’ or ‘a little’. Between 14% (Shopping Card) and a quarter (Food Club) of these said this was ‘totally’ due to the product.
• Wider health and well-being outcomes: 57% of Food Club and 48% of Shopping Card customers said the products helped them become ‘less stressed, anxious, or depressed about their financial situation’.
  • A quarter of Shopping Card and 46% of Food Club parents said their confidence had improved.
  • Around one in ten of both customer groups said the products helped to improve the physical or mental health of someone in their household.

Points to consider

• Methodological strengths/weaknesses: The precise measures and sample numbers on which they are based are not stated, which makes it difficult to interpret the findings and their importance.
  • While the authors note that over 90% of all respondents were White females, no adjustment was made for the potentially biasing effects of initial non-response or on the effects of attrition between baseline and follow-up. Only differences between the two customer groups (by product) appear to have been considered.
  • There was no comparison or control group to compare the outcomes of customers who received the credit products with those who did not or those who may have borrowed from elsewhere, making attribution to Fair For You difficult.
  • There is a reliance on retrospective self-reported outcomes for part of the sample, which reduces reliability of the findings.
• Generalisability/ transferability: Response rates are low, which makes it difficult to generalise the findings from the sample to the overall customer base and therefore the wider population in need of small-sum, short-term loans.
• Applicability: The authors report several baseline (pre-product) findings which do not contribute to conclusions about outcomes or potential impacts.
  • Findings from questions that were filtered from responses to earlier question are often based on very small sample numbers (e.g. below 20) and should be treated with caution.
• Relevance: The evaluation is of interest to anyone with an interest in developing interventions which involve difficulties faced by low-income households.