You won’t often hear a social enterprise chief executive say that money isn’t such a big deal, and you’re not going to hear it from me either. At the Wise Group, our job is to lift people out of poverty for the long term, and cash benefit payments to people living in poverty absolutely have a role to play.

Very often, we are working with people who will not have heating tomorrow without money today, or who cannot put breakfast on the table tomorrow without money today. So, the importance of benefits like the Scottish Child Payment or Winter Heating Benefit should not be understated. But it should also not be overstated.

We have a habit, I think, of looking at the payment of benefits as ‘job done’. The truth is far from that. Benefit payments may help temporarily, but for those we support, living in deep poverty, these benefits don’t even touch the sides. They do not lift people out of poverty in the longer term. That requires far more than money.

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We know this first hand from our approach, which we call Relational Mentoring. This model provides a crucial link between policy and people. For example, there may be a policy to provide help with heating costs.

A person may be able to turn on their heating today, but our Relational Mentoring might uncover the fact that they have their heating on with their windows open. In other words, the person is a grateful recipient of the policy, but the policymaker may not........

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