• Eighty-five per cent of those tasks which are completed are accomplished by household members or friends, neighbours and relatives. Eighty-two per cent of households would like to engage in more activity for themselves and others.

• Jobless households are less able than employed households to get work completed and to improve their situation by helping themselves and others. This was particularly the case in the South.

• People are prevented from getting work done and from helping themselves and others by their lack of money, equipment, time, skills, confidence, physical abilities and social networks, as well as a perceived lack of a local sense of community and a mistaken fear of losing entitlement to benefits.

• The researchers conclude that policies are needed to help people do more for themselves and others, through:
  

  - bottom-up initiatives, such as Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), Employee Mutuals and Mutual Aid contracts, to tackle the lack of individual skills; and - new top-down initiatives, including reform of the voluntary and community sector of New Deal for Communities and the introduction of an Active Citizens Credits scheme, to tackle issues related to benefit entitlement and social exclusion at the community level.

BackgroundMany are wary of advocating self-help for fear that it might lead to a reduction in welfare provision. However, two economic trends suggest such activity can be complementary to, not a substitute for, formal employment and welfare provision:

• In the late 1990s, 27 per cent of the working-age population do not have a job. This level can be much higher in deprived urban neighbourhoods. The gap between the current employment rate and full employment therefore remains wide.
  
• The UK economy is becoming more informal: other work has shown that, by 1995, 58 per cent of total work time was spent o­n unpaid work, an increase of ten percentage points from 1985/6.

A 1997 report supported by the JRF, Unshackling the Poor by Richard Macfarlane, indicated that self-help and mutual aid could complement job creation as additional tools for tackling social exclusion. As part of its Area Regeneration programme, the JRF then supported this investigation of the extent and nature of such activity in deprived neighbourhoods and whether it could be harnessed. 

The study surveyed 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield, examining three types of self-help activity:

• household work and DIY, when the work was undertaken by household members for themselves and, o­n an unpaid basis, for each other; 
  
• mutual aid, when the work was provided o­n an unpaid basis by relatives living outside the household, by friends and neighbours or by organised voluntary and community groups; and 
  
• informal exchange, when goods and services were exchanged for money and gifts which were unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax, social security or labour law purposes. 

The researchers used a list of 44 tasks, including outdoor and indoor painting, wallpapering, plastering, plumbing, housework, shopping, making and repairing clothes, car repair, gardening and child-care.

Getting by in deprived neighbourhoodsIn the deprived urban neighbourhoods studied, many households were unable to complete numerous basic tasks. In the relevant time period, households had completed less than half (47 per cent) of the 44 tasks surveyed. Although not all were relevant to all households (for example, car maintenance), respondents viewed 63 per cent of these uncompleted tasks as being necessary to maintaining a reasonable quality of life but o­nes which they felt unable to undertake. For example, 56 per cent of households had not had the outside of their home painted during the past five years, even though 90 per cent of these households wished to have it done (to prevent the fabric of the building deteriorating). Much important work remains left undone, therefore, despite the wishes of households.

Of those tasks which households did undertake, 85 per cent were conducted primarily through self-help: 76 per cent using mainly DIY, 4 per cent chiefly mutual aid and 5 per cent principally informal exchange (see Figure 1). 

Households ability to complete necessary work, however, was strongly correlated with their job status. Jobless households were unable to complete a much larger number of tasks compared with employed households. These jobless households not only engaged in a narrower range of tasks than employed households, but were also less likely to use self-help in order to get the work completed (see Figure 2). For example, jobless households comprised 54 per cent of all households surveyed but conducted just 50 per cent of all DIY, 43 per cent of all mutual aid and 30 per cent of all informal exchange activities. 

It was not o­nly job status that influenced households ability to get work done and to participate in self-help. There was also a strong North-South divide. Southampton households completed a significantly smaller proportion of the work seen as necessary to maintain their quality of life than Sheffield households. This was particularly the case for jobless households in Southampton who engaged in a narrower range of activities and used self-help less than their Northern counterparts. 

Barriers to participation in self-helpAlthough 82 per cent of all households in these deprived neighbourhoods wished to undertake more self-help activities, the survey identified six key barriers that prevented them from doing so:

• a lack of money and access to equipment (economic capital);
  
• a lack of people upon whom they can call for help, especially when made unemployed (social network capital);
  
• a lack of skills, confidence or the physical abilities to conduct self-help activities (human capital)
  
• a fear (especially amongst unemployed people) that if they engage in mutual aid with others, they might be reported to the authorities and thus lose benefit entitlement (institutional barriers);
  
• a sense that they should keep themselves to themselves due to their negative perception of the neighbourhood (environmental barriers); and
  
• a lack of time, especially amongst the employed, but also amongst unemployed people who feel pressured to spend their time looking for a job rather than helping others (time capital).

ConclusionThe researchers conclude that the current approach of creating job opportunities to provide people with greater income needs to be complemented by more direct measures which harness peoples abilities to help themselves and others.

On the o­ne hand, this requires the development of a range of community-based initiatives (for example, LETS, Employee Mutuals, Mutual Aid contracts). These all directly tackle many of the social network, environmental and human capital barriers to participation in self-help by effectively developing the social contacts, community cohesion and skills of the local population. 

On the other hand, tackling the economic, institutional and time barriers requires top-down changes. The researchers suggest three policy options. 

• Extend the voluntary and community sector of the New Deal programme by giving unemployed people greater opportunity to define the social contribution that they wish to make. This would not o­nly reduce criticisms of the New Deal focusing o­n the compulsion to work, but would also give people a stake in deciding both what productive and meaningful contribution they can make to their communities and what needs exist which they could meet. This option, however, fails to address those who fall outside of the New Deal programme.
  
• Create an Active Citizens Credits scheme for those who wish to participate in caring or self-help activity for the good of their community. Under this non-compulsory scheme, individuals would engage in a portfolio of work that could be designed by the participants. As recompense, o­ne option is that - similar to time dollars in the US or to the workings of a LETS scheme - participants would receive o­ne hour credit for each hour worked, which they could at any time cash in by requesting an hours work in return from the system. 
  
• Provide a minimum guaranteed income for active citizenship so as to stimulate such activity, just as Working Families Tax Credit encourages employment by providing a guaranteed income. If paid via the tax credit system, either at the same rate as for employees or at a lower rate that exempts people from the need to claim additional means-tested benefits, this might:- lift the constraints that currently prevent people from helping themselves and others whilst waiting for formal employment; and- create a fully integrated tax/benefit system based o­n active citizenship which avoids the criticisms about compulsion levelled at welfare-to-work policies.

About the studyThis report is based o­n an analysis of structured interviews conducted with 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield. In each city, two types of neighbourhood were examined: an inner-city neighbourhood, composed of mostly private sector housing and with the highest concentration of ethnic minorities in the city; and a neighbourhood of mostly social housing locally viewed as a sink estate.

The interview schedule used 44 basic tasks to examine the extent of self-help. When a task had been undertaken, the household was asked what source of labour they used and why. If not undertaken, they were asked if they felt it needed doing and if so, why they felt they could not complete it. These barriers were investigated using both open-ended questions and Likert scales to assess a range of attitudinal statements concerning self-help activity. The same 44 tasks were then used to examine the extent to which households had helped others and what had constrained such activity.