Agenda item

The Committee previously received a report concerning the Council’s Cost of Living response. This report provides an update on the activity in this area.

Cllr Nathan Ley, Cabinet Member for Public Health, Inequalities and Community Safety, Robin Rogers, Programme Director, Partnerships and Delivery, and Paul Wilding, Programme Manager, Partnerships and Delivery have been invited to present this item.

The Committee is recommended, having considered the report and responses to questions, to AGREE any recommendations it wishes to make to Cabinet arising therefrom.

Cllr Nathan Ley, Cabinet Member for Public Health, Inequalities and Community Safety, Robin Rogers, Programme Director, Partnerships and Delivery, and Paul Wilding, Programme Manager, Partnerships and Delivery presented an update report on the Council’s Cost of Living response.

Cllr Ley introduced the report, highlighting that the funding for the Council’s activities came not only from the £6.72m from central government’s Household Support Fund, but £2.8m also directly from the Council’s budget. The report introduced the national context, local issues, the rationale for the shape of support, spending to date, and issues encountered.

In response to the introduction, Committee members began raising a number of questions and observations, including:

-        The reasons for significant underspends, such as the Housing Benefit, which had accrued no committed expenditure out of a budget of £1.7m. It was confirmed this money would all be distributed at once and was due to be released the following month. Others, such as the Resident Support Scheme were currently underspent, but were new schemes. Take-up was growing significantly as awareness increased.

-        The degree of complexity involved in the multiple sources of support for both recipients and providers, and whether it would be effective to raise universal benefits instead.

-        The detail of the Council’s community wealth building activity and its role as an anchor institution. In response it was explained that the Council had engaged the Centre for Local Economic Studies to grow the Council’s ambition and action in relation to developing social value and community wealth building. At present, the Council was trying to find its place amidst the multiple other stakeholders and the transition of Local Economic Partnership powers into the Council. Anchor institutions were key local economic and social institutions, such as the councils, hospitals, universities and major employers who held significant influence over land ownership, employment and procurement practices. Several of these institutions were interested in finding ways to address inequality amongst their own staff, as well as more widely and the ambition was to coordinate these efforts and make best use of the levers available to different institutions to maximise the impact overall.

-        Given that poverty can be measured against many different headings, how the Council measured it was explored.  It was explained that the data being collated to create insight profiles would inform that measurement.  Much support that was being provided was crisis-level support rather than related specifically to a particular measure of poverty.  A dashboard was being created which would provide a granularity of data that had been hitherto unavailable.  Child poverty, food poverty, and transport poverty were suggested as key areas for the dashboard to show.  An all-member briefing on the dashboard would be welcomed by members.

-        It was suggested that the long-term financial challenges were such that the Council and other public sector organisations were needed to provide a secure framework for residents.  The importance of maintaining funding for this stream in future budgets was emphasised.

-        The expense of school uniforms was raised with an encouragement to schools to use easily- and widely-available clothing rather than requiring specific retailers.

-        The rise in the education leaving age to 18 had an impact on 16-18 year olds in rural areas where public transport links were weak given the increase in motor insurance costs.

-        Educating children about sustainability and how to avoid food waste was to be encouraged.  Focussed work in schools would have an impact on poverty.

-        The importance of targeting support at those most in need was emphasised with multi-agency working being key.  There was an encouragement to move away from the concept of ‘deprived divisions’ because, depending on the indicators, this was misleading and super output areas were more relevant.  Ostensibly wealthy areas could suffer from transport poverty and there were areas of wealth in seemingly deprived areas.  Granularity was key for information but what was most important was what was done with the data.  Sustainability and effectiveness was necessary.

-        There was a wide range of datasets available from a number of organisations.  Incorporating insights from them in building the dashboard would be very wise.

The Committee AGREED to make to Cabinet the following recommendation:

-        that the forthcoming dashboard include measures or indicators relating to child, transport and food poverty;

-        that the Council provides a list of the institutions it has consulted with in the development of its poverty dashboard and the data sets it will employ

and the following observations: concerning

-        the importance of what follows this intervention, and Scrutiny in some way or other intends to be involved in this conversation

-        the importance of up to date and granular data to allow identification of pockets of poverty of different types, and the preference for using super-output areas rather than wards as much as possible.

-        The value of making direct contact with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and specifically Sabina Alkire, and understanding the multi-dimensional poverty index as employed by the Alkire-Foster method.

Actions

The following actions were agreed:

-        To arrange an all member briefing/introduction to the poverty dashboard