Jack-of-all-trades charity Changing Lives Together (CLT) has its eyes on a new location – Crewe. The charity has provided a range of services to people in Cheshire for 25 years, from two locations in Winsford and one in Northwich. CLT offers community support groups, affordable groceries, school buses for disabled children, pre-loved white goods, you name it. But why has a former WHSmith in Crewe been chosen as the new location?
Connor Naismith, MP for Crewe and Nantwich, paints a bleak picture of the situation in his hometown. He says it’s due to Conservative government cuts.
“We’ve seen things like domestic abuse provision come under threat, all sorts of services that have a real impact on people’s lives, and particularly some of the most vulnerable members of our society.”
Naismith said people in need in Crewe and Nantwich are struggling to make ends meets.
He said: “They are certainly not in a position to be able to think about luxuries like having a holiday or anything like that. And that is unacceptable in a country like Britain in 2025.
“We’ve got more food banks than we’ve got McDonald’s.”
Naismith also admits the Labour government’s October budget included several measures which “the government wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to do, but inherited a difficult set of circumstances.” This includes the cuts to the winter fuel payment, which meant 10 million pensioners did not receive a payment this winter.
The MP admits the country is far away from where he would like it to be. He quotes the government’s plan for a “decade of national renewal” to say Crewe might be ten years away from the situation he wants to see.
Loneliness is another problem that Naismith says is “always on his mind” – when he goes out door-knocking, he’ll find constituents who want to spend a long time talking to him, often because he’s one of the few people they’ve actually spoken to that week.
This has been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic – 7.1% of the UK say they feel lonely “often or always”, compared to 6% in 2020.
Naismith admits he “doesn’t know” what the answer is, but says he’s open to looking for it. He says one place Crewe and Nantwich might start is with more spaces that are the centres of communities, like a local pub, that “restore a sense of civic purpose.”
Rachel Waterman, Head of Business Development at CLT, hopes the new location in Crewe can do just that. She told me about how the Old School House, CLT’s Northwich location, is a stomping ground for the lonely and the vulnerable across Cheshire – not least because you can have a full English, tea and toast there for £3.75.
“People will come to the Very Green Grocery to shop, but they’ll come in an hour early, because they’ve seen our café, and have a brew.”
The Very Green Grocery is a “social supermarket” run by CLT, that allows customers to pay what they can when they shop for groceries. The shop is supplied by partnerships, for example with Morrisons’ distribution, who supply a range of chilled and shelf-stable food.
But, as Waterman told me, it has also been a “beautiful, non-judgmental, friendly, warm place” for the community.
Waterman told me how one customer “hadn’t been out the house for 6 months, because his wife had passed and he was struggling, but he walked his dog down the road, popped in for a brew, and now he’s a regular there every week.”
Her pride and joy, though, is the Buddy and Befriending scheme, which offers phone calls and group meetings to those who are lonely or socially isolated. Waterman tells me with a smile, “I would die for this project.
“I’m currently trying to find the funding to keep it going, and we will keep it going, because I will sell my house to keep it going.”
Waterman has a clear vision for CLT in Crewe (although she still doesn’t know what she’ll do with a large underground space they have, and jokes she is considering a roller disco.) But so far, I’d been at a certain remove from CLT, and the people they were helping. So, I visited CLT’s ReUse warehouse in Winsford, to speak to the boots on the ground.
My first impression of the neatly laid-out warehouse, full of pre-loved bikes, disused washing machines and settees in neat rows, was the temperature. Until they get an incinerator, says staff member Ross Poynton, it will remain freezing cold. It’s easy to talk about charity and helping people in abstract terms, but braving all day in a freezing warehouse shows a strong ethos behind what the CLT staff do. Poynton, 27, admits “I’d like this place a lot better if it was warm.”
The Winsford warehouse is also quite hard to reach – Waterman is probably right to suggest that Crewe is a more ideal location for connecting those in need across Cheshire. Hidden away on an industrial estate, down a cul-de-sac, next to a housing estate, it’s surprising the ReUse Warehouse sees any business at all.
Like Waterman, Poynton gushes about working at the Very Green Grocery. He admits that he shops there too – “pay £6 you get £30 of groceries” – and that a lot of people really rely on services like those.
He also expressed disdain for distributors who might throw whole pallets of goods like eggs away, because the cartons have got wet. “They don’t care because it’s insured.”
I ask Poynton how old the customers at the Grocery generally are, and he surprises me. “Lots of people using the groceries are younger… the volunteers are mostly 60-70 years old.”
People aged 65-74 are consistently the most likely demographic to volunteer, and 26-34 are the least. I was reminded of Waterman’s call for volunteers at the end of our interview – she needs hundreds of volunteers to run the Buddy and Befriending scheme alone.
Elderly people are especially likely to suffer from loneliness – Age UK reports that a million older people in the UK sometimes feel lonely. This paints a picture as bleak as one that Crewe’s MP described. Elderly people, who are often at the sharp end of social care cuts, are therefore disproportionately the ones tasked with helping themselves – for free. The MP’s final message to the people of Crewe was “I’m confident that the government is taking the right steps… bear with, basically.” Will the addition of Changing Lives Together allow the people of Crewe to bear with for a bit longer?
Featured image by Chris Patel
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