Policy is personal

A guest post by Charlie Chan, Director of United Communities, reflecting on her own experience of the real-life impacts of policy decisions

I thought I was just dealing with the consequences of my choices. It took me a while to realise I was also navigating the intricacies of policy in practice.

Growing up, I imagined policy as something abstract, something confined to a dusty grey lever-arch file on a bookshelf in a musty office. Not something that would directly impact my life. Maybe others’. But not mine. Which, in hindsight, is often how policy works.

I was 17 when I became pregnant. There’s a particular kind of silence that follows news like that. Not a peaceful silence. I had to leave home.

And this is where policy quietly enters my personal story – not loudly, not dramatically, just… administratively. Which, as it turns out, is how a lot of life-altering things are managed.

I needed to find a home, but at 17 I wasn’t old enough to enter into a tenancy agreement, and I couldn’t apply for housing benefit until I turned 18. Policy had drawn a line. Not around need, but around a number.

I’m sure there are very sensible reasons for this. Not least because numbers are very tidy; much tidier than people. But the fact that I was legally old enough to become a parent, yet not legally old enough to house us, felt like a plot hole.

When I turned 18, housing benefit came through. And for all its blunt edges, it worked. It kept a roof over my head during the final phase of my pregnancy and gave me nine months of something that felt like stability – long enough to begin learning how to be someone’s mum. (It also gave us both nine months of breathing in black mould that was never sorted before I left. Mould was dealt with by a different department...)

There’s a stereotype about teenage mums. You know it. I know it. It’s loud, it’s lazy, it’s irresponsible, and it’s deeply uninterested in nuance. Nuance is not a strong performer in the public imagination. It doesn’t test well in focus groups. So I imagine most people won’t have read this far assuming I had a full-time job when I fell pregnant. But I did.

I went on maternity leave just before my 18th birthday and quickly my income dropped from a whopping £750 a month to about £90 a week of Statutory Maternity Pay. Statutory pay sounds reassuring. Like it comes with a cup of camomile tea and someone saying, “it’s all going to be okay”. But £90 a week didn’t quite stretch. It did, however, introduce me to a less-than-ideal budgeting strategy: bill-paying roulette.

(For anyone wondering – council tax is not the one to skip. That one escalates quickly. With letters. And a stern tone. And eventually, bailiffs - which is a particular spice of scary as a young single woman with a newborn.)

This is what I’ve learned about policy: it can be a safety net and a tightrope at the exact same time. And sometimes you don’t realise which one it is until you fall off.

At 19, I applied for a job at the local authority. Let’s be clear – I was not the strongest candidate. My experience included six months in admin, during which I was once compared to Howard from Take That. Talented; full of potential; just not in the currently required category. (No shade on Howie, I was personally quite the fan.)

By any reasonable interpretation of recruitment policy, I shouldn’t have got the job. But I was interviewed by Andrea. She asked why I wanted the job. I told her the truth: I had a baby, and I wanted more for her. More for us.

Now, that answer probably didn’t score highly on the official scoring sheet. But Andrea did something policy doesn’t quite know how to contain: she used discretion. Discretion is a disruptive concept in systems that favour consistency and rules, valuing what can be measured and plotted neatly on graphs. Humanity colours way outside of those particular lines.

Andrea chose to look beyond the stereotype and saw me not just as a teenage mum trying her luck, but as a young person she could give an opportunity to. Her decision changed the trajectory of my life, which is quite a lot of responsibility for an early interview slot on a Monday morning.

Every time I’ve had the chance to do that since – to pay it forward – I have. Because I know what it makes possible. With my first proper pay cheque, I set up a standing order to my daughter’s Child Trust Fund – a government-launched, tax-free savings account – for £10 a month. Always the relentless optimist. The government contributed £1,000, and by the time she turned 18, that mix of policy and persistence bought her first car.

Policy can be pedantic, but it can also be possibility. But then there are moments where policy feels more like a game of chess, where one small move forward can cost you the game.

I remember the first food parcel I handed out. (Not technically my job. I was explicitly told as much. But everyone was at lunch, I knew where the key was, and I decided to explore my own relationship with discretion.)

A young mum – let’s call her Alice – came in with her baby. Her partner had received a small bonus at work. A recognition of his hard work. A good thing. Unless, of course, you’re thinking several moves ahead.

The small (taxable) bonus nudged their income just over the threshold for child tax credits – by a few pounds. Which meant they were issued a repayment notice. Not for the few pounds. For an entire year of payments. The “overpayment” was more than the (taxable) bonus. Which sounds less like maths and more like a twist in Traitors.

So in order to repay money they didn’t have, this young, working family had to ask for a food parcel. At the time, food banks required proof. Forms. Limits. Three parcels total. Because crises, like most things, are managed by systems. And systems like efficiency. “Work hard, but stay in your lane”, said policy inadvertently.

By this point, I was earning £850 a month. The childcare bill I needed to pay in order to go to work was also £850. Fortunately, those costs were covered by the tax credits I qualified for, reserved for the lowest income households. So, one part of the government paid me a salary it already knew wasn’t enough, while another stepped in to fix it, with rules. Which is either excellent co-ordination, or multiple opportunities for things to go very wrong. And those tend to tell their own story.

By 21, I knew I wanted to be a youth worker. I’d felt the deep value of youth and community work – from both sides. So I applied to university. And then I learned that students aren’t eligible for tax credits. So I traded income support that I didn’t need to repay for a huge debt that I am still paying back today. I wouldn’t change a thing, but it did feel like progress had a high interest rate.

And then 2010 happened. I was in the university library with my classmates from the youth and community degree course when one of them took a phone call (clearly breaking library policy). They said their boss had just been made redundant and the youth service had been cut. We laughed. Because sometimes the only appropriate response to something completely absurd is to assume it’s a joke. It wasn’t.

I didn’t graduate into the career I’d been building towards. That path had been removed by a policy decision made far away from that library. Which is impressive, really - the ability of policy to change someone’s life, for better or for worse, in an instant, and from a distance. But I did carve out a career at the intersection of education and youth and community. A career that ended up becoming a vocation. Just not in the linear way I’d once imagined. And my work is better because of that.

By the time I graduated, I started working full-time. My income was now higher than in my previous job, but still not quite enough to cover essentials. I wasn’t eligible for tax credits because I had been a student that financial year. So we became homeless. Not homeless enough for help. But homeless, nonetheless. Which is a very specific category.

Most of our belongings went into storage. Some of the more important things - such as my signed Take That poster - were housed in my office. The essentials came with us to a log cabin (a large shed at the bottom of a garden). Temporary, I thought. Which is what you always think about things that last longer than they should.

I called the housing department at the local authority and asked to be put on the housing waiting list. They told me there was no point. We weren’t a priority or considered homeless according to their policy, because we had a roof over our heads. “Even though it’s made of wood, has no hot water or kitchen - and we’re sharing a bed?”, I asked. Yes, they said. And because I assumed the rules were being applied as they were written, we lived outside them for a while.

To be continued…

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Policies aren’t intentionally designed to cause harm. But they aren’t necessarily designed together either, or by those most likely to be affected by them. So they overlap. They collide. They compound. And become the status quo.

And many of us - knowingly or not - play a part in sustaining that. Which can be uncomfortable. And useful to notice. The more I understand this, the harder it is to ignore.

I’m grateful for the support I received – I just no longer mistake it for a solution.

I’m increasingly meeting people who are committed to shifting systems. And they are succeeding. These people aren’t just talking about fairness - they’re attempting it. Which is messier, and slower. But necessary. Because that’s how real change happens. And that gives me hope - even if nuance still isn’t a particularly strong performer.

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This piece was written by Charlie Chan, Director of United Communities. It was sparked by a conversation with Will Snell, CEO of the Fairness Foundation, at the Anthropy National Gathering 2026. Charlie was able to be at Anthropy through the generosity of UK Acumen Academy and United Learning.