‘I worked for Liz Truss – she’s always focused on the data’

“This summer, we have been seeing problems that we would normally associate with winter,” says Dame Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice. “Now winter is coming and things will get even worse. The scale is that stark. That’s my biggest concern.”

The 59-year-old former career civil servant – she was permanent secretary in two big Whitehall departments before she moved into the voluntary sector 18 months ago – is by instinct unflappable, skilled at removing emotion from situations. So for her to use the word “stark” is to hear a siren that the current cost of living crisis is only going to get worse, despite the Government’s injection of £150 billion to freeze energy costs.

This week, Moriarty met delegates at Conservative Party Conference. She told them that people on Universal Credit are already struggling to make ends meet, especially with the Cabinet split over whether to raise benefits – as previously promised as recently as May – to keep pace with inflation at 10 per cent, or by the current five per cent figure for wage rises.

“We thought an inflation-level rise was a baked in promise,” Moriarty says. “But if they go for wages instead it will be a cut in real terms when we already have so many coming to us in crisis, at a time when benefit levels are already at the lowest they have been as a share of average earnings since the welfare state was set up.” Benefit payments currently represent 15 per cent of average earnings.

Citizens Advice – which dispenses free advice through trained volunteers in 258 local branches – has so far this year seen record numbers of 137,000 coming through its doors in search of what it calls “crisis support”; vouchers for food banks or charitable funds to help pay for energy. That is a 50 per cent increase on the same period last year and a 167 per cent increase on 2019. A further 2.5 million are using its website.

“The people we are most worried about this winter are those who are already in crisis,” says Moriarty. That is why she is “in regular contact” with Whitehall – though it dipped, she says, in the summer during the Tory leadership battle. In her time as permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Liz Truss was one of the Secretaries of State she served. Both she and the PM, she recalls, put a heavy reliance on data to drive policy. “What I remember is Truss’s huge focus on data. She isn’t a mathematician,” – Moriarty graduated in the subject – “but she is very interested in maths. Truss’s father is a mathematician. So I would very much hope she will listen to the data.”

Most at risk during the cost of living crisis are those “at the sharp end” of the income scale, already unable to afford energy and food, says Moriarty. But even middle-earners are feeling the pinch. “At Citizens Advice, we are seeing people earning £40-£50,000 who were worrying about being unable to cope with the October rise in the energy cap,” she says. If you have a mortgage, she explains, it can eat up a salary like that. “You don’t have bandwidth for much higher energy bills. But for those people, the energy price cap will make a big difference.”

Moriarty sees her task as pressing her former colleagues in government departments, and their new ministers, to provide “further support” for those who she believes remain most at risk. And this needs to be carefully targeted, she adds, best of all through the benefits system.

“We have already seen various support packages from the Government with a strongly targeted element – for those on benefits and disabled people – because the crisis is impacting people unequally,” she says.

While concerns about rising prices and costs are heard at all levels, she draws a distinction between those “for whom this is about one less holiday a year” and those “for whom this is not a bit of a squeeze, who have nowhere to go, and who come to us”.

Some of the stories, says Moriarty, are “hard to hear”. “At the moment we have families [the 25-45 age-group is the biggest in their data] coming to us closer than ever to crisis point. They come in having run out of gas and electricity and they are about to run out of food. At the same time I have heard of examples where food banks say they are running out of food [as their usual donors are also feeling the pinch].”

What has struck home with her in particular is the number of people turning up at Citizens Advice “for whom having to come there for help feels shocking”.

“I recall a woman on a state pension who had just never thought she would ever need to ask for help, or the man who was making one meal last two days, exacerbating his existing health condition,” she says. “It’s more people, more problems, more complex needs. Advisers go through everything they can help with, but there are people who just can’t make ends meet.”

She has in the past described the efforts of her colleagues in such dreadful situations as “trying to hold back the tide with a bucket”. But today her language is more measured.

In a recent Radio 4 interview series presented by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Moriarty revealed herself as a church-goer at home in Hampshire (she has two university-age children). Does she ever allow herself to vent anger at social injustice?

“I feel it very, very strongly and there are times when I could happily shout from the rooftops. I don’t know how much of [what stops me] is personality, training or knowing that I want things to be heard. The legacy of working in government for a long time is that I know how easy it is for people to put up barriers to hearing.”

Why would they do that? “Because it is difficult, because you are trying to solve impossible problems and everything is about trade-offs. So I see my role at Citizens Advice as translating for Government what we are seeing happen on the ground in ways that people hear them. That is what ultimately makes change happen.”

Moriarty is rightly proud of the extensive month-by-month “data dashboard” that Citizens Advice makes publicly available, based on its interactions with those who come to seek its help. It shows, for example, that in 2021, by the end of August they had seen 4,500 people who couldn’t afford to top-up their pre-payment energy meter (mainly used by those on the lowest incomes), so they couldn’t run their fridge, cooker or heating system. By the same month this year that figure stands at 15,000. And as winter bites, the implications of not being able to afford energy will be even more damaging.

And so to the new Government. Does Moriarty believe that Liz Truss, her former boss, will show that she has an open mind and open heart in considering further “handouts” to those in need because of the energy crisis and spike in inflation? She looks momentarily ruffled, before replying: “I’m not going to answer that.”

There certainly has been plenty of good-hearted and well-intentioned advice on budgeting of late from Conservative ministers and MPs. Lee Anderson, MP from the “Red Wall” seat of Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, suggested cooking lessons. Then minister of state (Ministry of Justice) Rachel Maclean counselled those unable to make ends meet should get better jobs. And George Eustice, then Environment Secretary, advised trading down and buying supermarket own-label products rather than branded versions.

“That is also hard to hear,” says Moriarty, “when it is presented as being ‘all people need to do is X and it will all be OK’. We know that people coming to us are cutting back on everything. It’s the idea that there is a single-bullet solution and everything will be fine. Manifestly, it will not.”

The firm tone in her voice on the final remark is the most impassioned she gets throughout our conversation. Perhaps it is that hint of steel that could account for why she was, according to reports, last month dropped from the list the Treasury had agreed of four non-executive members to join the Bank of England’s board.

She is clearly irked by her treatment. “I read the reports,” she says. “I haven’t been told the outcome formally but I believe myself not to have been successful in my application and interview.”

She was, she believes, well-qualified for the post because of her government experience and as an accountant, but also as chief executive of Citizens Advice (the BoE job is a part-time role). “I felt I could bring something. Otherwise I would not have applied.”

These are, she concedes, “turbulent times” and she has been around public appointment processes long enough to know “they can take a long time”. But did she ever run one where someone was publicly embarrassed as she has been? “No.”

It’s clear that Clare Moriarty is someone who, despite her cautious approach in public, is able to get people’s backs up in Whitehall and Westminster. Just the sort of person, then, to talk truth to power from her front-row seat, in what promises to be a tough winter for millions.