Hansard

Thank you, convener. Like Joy, I am grateful that we have been given the opportunity to speak to the committee about our report on local action to tackle poverty. With me are Trevor Lakey from the Greater Glasgow Health Board and Paul Zealey from the Glasgow Development Agency, who were also members of the team. I can spot another member, John Mulvey, in the public gallery, but he has his head down at the moment. I am glad that he, too, is here, because I want to emphasise that this was very much a team report.I think that you all have a handout, which I will speak to. I am sorry that some of you did not receive the reports at the time that you were meant to. I think that they were distributed on Friday, in the hope that you would have them over the weekend, but I appreciate that, because of logistical difficulties, reports may not have reached members until yesterday. The first part of the report has the merit of being brief, so at least it has something to commend it.I will begin with the team's remit. In the handout, I say that we were asked to look at the"effectiveness and sustainability of local anti-poverty action".The thinking behind that was that, over the years, there has been a great deal of investment in local anti-poverty action throughout Scotland. Two problems that we have not tackled very effectively are assessing how well the action has worked and managing to sustain projects or to replicate them more widely. There have been pockets of good practice, but disseminating the findings and sustaining the approach have proved difficult.We were asked to consider what more could be done to make things better, to generate new ideas for action and to identify ways of supporting best practice. We all felt that we were not starting with a blank sheet of paper. As I have said, there has been a great deal of activity over the years. There is a great deal of knowledge, activity and investment out there, in communities, which can be drawn on and developed.In the context of the earlier report, we talked about the difficulty of disseminating best practice. That is a common theme and an issue that arises in other reports, such as "Inclusive Communities" and "Making It Happen". When considering social policy, one bumps against such matters all the time.In pursuing their remits, all the teams were asked to take particular account of gender issues, the racial dimension, disability and the problems faced by people living in remote rural areas. We tried to do that, although we are all aware that we were not able to devote as much time to those dimensions as we would have liked. There were exchanges with people working in rural areas and with people representing ethnic minorities. We did our best to pursue that.I have outlined the membership of the action team—it also appears in the report—to demonstrate that the team covered a wide range of skills, experience and knowledge. Two people on the team, Lynne Main and Carey Sinclair, have had first-hand experience of living and grappling with poverty in impoverished communities. There was practical experience as well as professional and theoretical knowledge. I was very grateful for the hard work of the team, the commitment that its members brought to their task and the contributions that they made. Three members of the team, Damian Killeen, Lynne Main and I, are also members of the social inclusion network, so we have that connection.What is anti-poverty action? The slide gives some examples of the kind of projects that we undertake. There is a wide range of activities, dealing with the basics of life: food, warmth, money, work and benefits. Possessions are also important: some of the local exchange and trading schemes are about exchanging skills and practical items. Child care, as we have already mentioned, is one of the key components. One of the main ways out of poverty is work, so for many people, especially women, good-quality child care is critical.At our first meeting, we were knocked back by the scale of the task. We are facing a very large canvas. We had limited time in which to present our initial report, and we felt that we needed to break it down into manageable areas. We knew that if we continued to meet as a team, we would not cover much ground. Although the team met monthly, we also broke down into four main groups.One group was asked to consider money and financial services, because the main themes that we were pursuing were how local anti-poverty action could maximise income and how that action could reduce living costs. The two things go hand in hand. The second group considered food, health and living standards. The third group considered the importance of routes into training and employment for people who live in impoverished communities. The fourth group considered the social economy: activity that is not conducted for profit—any surplus is ploughed back—and is tailored to people's needs.We had a fifth group that did some work on assessment criteria, which fed into the work of the other four groups; in other words, it asked "how do we assess this action in the first place and how do we know that it is working?"Our report falls into two parts, the second of which consists of the reports from those four sub-groups. The first part, which is quite short, tries to focus on some of the big questions. The findings were based on discussions between the sub-groups and a range of people, while members of the plenary group came to talk to us about specific issues. Through a letter in Third Force News and other mechanisms, we invited contributions from external groups, agencies and individuals and tried to boil the matter down to various key questions.The first question we asked ourselves was why we have local anti-poverty action. We concluded that its primary purpose is to alleviate the immediate impact of income poverty and to help people who are living impoverished lives, in impoverished communities, with limited resources—not just money—at their disposal. Our second conclusion was that, although most of us access opportunities, goods and services through the market, it does not work well for people who live in poverty. At best, it works imperfectly for such people. We saw local anti-poverty action, therefore, as a grass-roots response to that failure of the market, and the failure of public services such as the benefits system, the health service and education. People who live in poverty find it more difficult than most of the rest of us to access the kind of services that we take for granted.The second question that we asked ourselves was why we should support anti-poverty action. We did not take it as a given that such action is good. We have to look at what purpose it serves. Can it justify itself in its own terms? We came up with three specific points. First, we felt that in a society that claims to care about all its members and to be equal and inclusive, there is a moral imperative to alleviate the worst effects of income poverty. If local anti-poverty action does that, that is a justification for it at a fundamental level.We also saw it as a mechanism for people who find it difficult to make their voices heard, to articulate to the providers of services, whether in the public sector, private sector or government, what it is that they want and need. It is a mechanism for providing the continuous feedback loop that forms part of the modernising government agenda. If services, whether they are provided by the public or the private sector, are to improve, their providers need to know what is wanted. We saw local anti-poverty action as a means of articulating what poor people want.Thirdly, while it is an activity that has merits in its own right, it offers many people a way out of poverty and exclusion. For some of them it is their first involvement in working with others, in taking control of their lives, and in making a difference—in increasing their self-esteem.The next slide—I am being hurried on, so I will move a bit faster—identifies the key characteristics of an effective local anti-poverty action. I will not go through all the points, but will emphasise the importance of rooting the action firmly in the community. The action must also be consistent with, and complemented by, activity at national level. The process is two-way: it needs to be both top-down and bottom-up, and it needs to connect. Often support needs to be sustained. We cannot always expect to get it right first time.The next slide sets out our main recommendations. The first is about"complementarity between national and local action".We recommended that there should be,"Flexible benefits pilots in SIP areas".That is about using the discretion in the system. It is also about improving the clarity of the system and helping people to find their way through the system.