Agenda item

To update Members on the progress of the Poverty and Hardship Plan.

Members were updated on the progress of the Poverty and Hardship Plan.  The report was presented by Emma Richardson, Senior Manager Specialist Services – Poverty Lead.

The following key issues were raised:-

·             The Poverty and Hardship Plan sat within the Northumberland Inequalities Plan and included funding agreed from the Public Health reserve and Integrated Care Board.

·             The plan was produced by a group with representation from key areas of the Council and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.

·             The Northumberland Community Centred Approach to close the inequalities gap had five principles and three questions:

·             Looking at everything through an inequalities lens

·             Voice of residents and better data sharing

·             Community strengths are considered first

·             Enhancing our services to ensure equity in access to opportunity.

·             Maximising our civic level responsibilities

·             What can communities do for themselves?

·             What might communities need some help with?

·             What can’t communities do that agencies can?

·             Pressures in households – included impact of inflation on food and energy, interest rates, average wages and spends.

·             Working with knowledge – The council had access to information and data to ensure the greatest impact and best value from limited resources, LIFT tool (Low Income Family Tracker), poverty and hardship data dashboard, reducing duplication and building partnerships and place based long term solutions.

·             Poverty and Hardship Dashboard – showed expenditure on a range of commodities as a percentage of total expenditure across income decile groups.

·             Understand the needs of residents using a targeted approach – LIFT tool.  Identifying most vulnerable families, target support to them and track the change.  Tackling problem debt and arrears, supporting families at risk of eviction, understanding how individual households were impacted by policy changes now and in the future.

·             Approach to Hardship support – household support fund and other grants, community events, warm spaces and pop ups.  Increased Citizens Advice capacity, including community advice, Financial Wellbeing Network and Northumberland Frontline.

·             Access to food support and affordable food.  Food insecurity and children. Requests for food support remained high.  Holiday voucher support to continue, holiday activity and food programme, free school meal auto enrolment.

·             Northumberland Energy Pathway – Energy Pathway Plus prioritised households adversely affected by cold homes.  A collaboration by a number of organisations.  Allocated funding for bespoke support, energy audits and home measures via the Integrated Care Board.

·             Giving children and young people the best start. – Holiday and Activity Food Programme and a number of education based interventions.

·             Community resilience was at the heart of everything we do.

·             In summary

·             This work keeps residents to stay safe and well while enduring costs of living pressures with effective well directed support.

·             To prevent further widening of the inequalities gap – building resilience and prevention on to support and crisis intervention.

·             Seed and learn pilots to build working collaborative relationships, and to support the longer-term preventative and proactive measures in the wider system inequalities plan.

A number of comments were made including:-

·             There was a recognised potential link between earlier offenders for shop theft and deprivation.  First time offenders could be signposted to food banks or other services.  Hopefully, this would prevent them from coming to the attention of the police again.

·             It was hoped that the two reports / presentations today would help members to see the bigger picture over the next five years for longer term change.  It also needed to consider what was being done ‘in the now’.  There were a number of ways in which work was going on across many communities to mitigate their circumstances whilst the longer term aims were progressed.

·             It was useful to see the scale and volume of the work being done and the positive direction of travel, the shared work and collaboration of partners across the system.

RESOLVED to note the contents of the report.