Official Report 696KB pdf
Our next agenda item is the first evidence session on post-legislative scrutiny of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017. The committee has already done some scrutiny work on child poverty, including inquiries into the impact of the Scottish child payment and efforts to increase earnings from parental employment.
This inquiry adds to that work by considering the impact of having a legislative framework in the act that underpins policies.
Today, we will hear from a panel of witnesses focusing on the impact of the act on local policy and delivery. I welcome the witnesses, who are attending remotely: Evan Beswick, who is the chief officer at Argyll and Bute health and social care partnership; Sally Buchanan, who is the library services and fairer Falkirk manager at Falkirk Council; Martin Booth, who is the executive director of finance at Glasgow City Council; and Peter Kelly, who is the chief executive of the Poverty Alliance. I thank all four of you for joining us; your support is appreciated.
We have received apologies from Charlotte Cuddihy from NHS Lothian, who unfortunately is unable to attend the meeting this morning.
I will mention a few housekeeping rules before we start the formal evidence session. I ask those giving evidence to wait until I say—or another member asking a question says—your name before you speak. Please allow our broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn on your microphone, as a small pause before speaking is desirable. Please also type “R” in the chat box if you wish to come in. Be a little patient, because the clerks will pass me the information—I will not see the chat box myself.
I ask everyone—I include myself in this—to keep questions and answers as concise as possible. The first question is from Collette Stevenson.
Good morning. I apologise for not being able to attend in person.
I want to touch on the reporting requirements. I thank each of you for the submissions that you have sent to us. Each of the submissions touches on the reporting requirements, saying that they are quite labour intensive and that they have been an added burden. To what extent have you been able to integrate reporting under the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 with other statutory reporting requirements? I put that question to Martin Booth first.
Good morning. Thank you for that question, Ms Stevenson.
The reporting requirements for anything that we do in local government are fairly onerous. Reporting under the 2017 act is slightly different—it certainly is in our position. However, the fact that we are working jointly with the health board to produce the report means that the reporting comes from a different place.
The need to produce an annual report is good, as it keeps us disciplined and it makes sure that we are working together and keeping our elected members well briefed. It also helps to ensure that focusing on this remains a key priority, but it does not particularly tie in with any of the other reporting. It is probably in the health and social care partnership where that reporting would be duplicated, rather than on the council side of things.
Thanks very much for that. Would Sally Buchanan like to come in on that point?
Good morning. I am happy to answer that question from the perspective of Falkirk Council. This year, we have taken steps to align the child poverty reporting requirements with the aims of our anti-poverty strategy, which forms part of the reporting of our local outcomes and improvement plan, under community planning.
This is the first year that we have got to that stage. Earlier this year, we got approval for our new anti-poverty strategy, which has a focus on targeting child poverty, and that will be our child poverty action plan going forward. We will report back annually on that wider strategy, which will focus on, and include a specific section on, what we are doing on child poverty.
We hope that doing that will streamline our reporting a bit, because a lot of time is spent on reporting. An annual reporting cycle comes around quite quickly, especially given the timescales for getting reports into council committees and then to community planning boards for approval. We want to make sure that we are leaving enough time for action, not just reporting. I am hopeful that, going forward, we will have a better balance.
Thanks very much for that, Sally. I see that Peter Kelly wants to come in. You were on my radar anyway, Peter, so I would welcome your comments.
It is good discipline to do annual reporting to make sure that child poverty—and poverty in general—stays high up on the agenda of local authorities and health boards. That good discipline is important.
There is undoubtedly a balance to be struck between reporting and doing. In our role as one of the national partners, we have certainly heard in a lot of feedback that the balance does not feel quite right sometimes and that there is a strong emphasis on reporting even though most—well, all—colleagues in local authorities and health boards want to get on and make sure that they are delivering.
It is good to reflect on that balance, but what is also partly an issue—Sally has already highlighted it—is that there must be scope to ensure that all those important responsibilities are streamlined and given due regard. Where there are responsibilities to report on—for instance, employability or child wellbeing—there are opportunities to see how that work can be better co-ordinated.
Finally, there is an issue around the resources that are available to do the co-ordination and planning. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities mentioned that point to the committee. Initially, £5,000 was given to local authorities to support the production of local child poverty action reports, but no other resource has been dedicated to that. I know that budgets are constrained across the public sector, but if we want to spend time—which is important time—on meaningfully planning and reporting on what we are doing on child poverty, the resources that are required for that need to be considered.
Thanks very much, Peter. I see that Evan Beswick would like to come in.
From an Argyll and Bute perspective, my one addition to the other witnesses’ sensible comments is on the small authority, remote and rural components of reporting. Every reporting requirement has a disproportionate impact on a small local authority like ours, where fewer than 100,000 people are spread across a huge landmass, including 28 inhabited islands. For every reporting requirement that we have, we have to produce the same number of reports as a large local authority but with fewer resources and, in particular, a smaller workforce.
Recruitment is a challenge for all local authorities, but particularly rural ones. Anything that can be done to streamline the reporting requirements, to make them a bit less onerous, would be really helpful and would enable us to focus on the work of reducing poverty.
Thank you, Evan. If no one else wants to come in I will pass back to the deputy convener.
Thank you, Collette. I call Liz Smith.
Good morning. I want to frame my questions around an important comment from the recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, which was published in October this year. The report was very supportive of the Scottish child payment, and we know that there has been excellent feedback from families who receive that payment.
However, the report criticised the United Kingdom Government and the Scottish Government on the point of data, saying that it was extremely difficult to measure the impact of the policy on actual outcomes. How easy is it for you to capture what you think is the most meaningful data, to measure how successful you are in reducing poverty?
Colleagues will have direct experience of how they are using data to address child poverty locally. We are a step removed from that, but what we have seen throughout the process since the 2017 act was passed is a greater focus on data and on the development and collection of local data.
That is a good focus to have, and local authorities—you see this right throughout the local child poverty action reports, whatever form they come in—pay strong attention to understanding the data that is available. That highlights where data is lacking and where there are still gaps in the data. I am sure that colleagues would reflect on that. Often, addressing large national data sets is outwith the control of local authorities or health boards. Through the labour force survey, we know that in-work poverty is a key dimension of the picture of child poverty, but getting good local labour market statistics, particularly on pay, to see whether policies are affecting that, is really challenging.
Local authorities and health boards are doing the best that they can with the data that they have. The Dundee fairness and local child poverty action plan takes a useful scorecard approach, linking its targets with available data to track progress over longer periods of time, from when the plan was initially set to the current year, and to make projections for the future.
The Dundee partnership is using the data as best it can, but there is undoubtedly a question to consider. You mentioned the Scottish child payment, and that is absolutely critical for the national picture. We need to get that right, and the Scottish and UK Governments need to work better together to get that sorted.
Could I push you a little further on that question, Mr Kelly? It is extremely important. How easy is it for you to identify where the gaps are in the national data, to improve the measurability of your policy commitments? You mentioned that you would like to see better data on employment in particular. Are there any other ways in which having better data could help in identifying how successful we are being in different areas?
09:15
The question is about the ability to use at the local level data that has been gathered at the national level, and you are asking how difficult it is to do that. It is very difficult, and there are significant gaps. In the local measurement of child poverty, we use proxies for the income data. We would prefer to have the income data, but I think—I should say that I am not a researcher or a data expert—that there is a balance to be struck between having that data and the resource that would be required to gather so much of it at the local level. Finding that balance is a real challenge—particularly, as Evan Beswick said, for smaller local authorities where the collection of that data is never going to be a priority.
I want to ask Mr Beswick if he has any further comments on that point, because it must be very difficult to collect the relevant data in Argyll and Bute. Is it a particular problem to do that in rural communities?
It absolutely is. I preface this by saying that I agree with Peter Kelly’s comments, although I am no data expert. One of the challenges is that a lot of our data sets do not cover the small pockets of population that we have, because they are not refined enough to do so. As Peter said, to do that at a local level would require significant resources.
Through the work that has been driven by the act, we have been able to invest money from the child poverty practice accelerator fund into some very technical and specific data work. We have bought in data sets from other organisations that have allowed us to refine our work and target it much more closely to where it is most needed. That work is resource intensive, but it has been very valuable that we have been able to do it.
That is interesting. We will come to the aspect of collaboration between different local authorities, which is important in trying to close up some of the gaps.
My final question is about how easy—
I apologise for talking across you, but Sally Buchanan and Martin Booth want to comment on the previous point.
Of course.
Thank you. We have spent a lot of time talking about data and gathering it, and we have made some really good progress with both those things, which has been very helpful in ensuring that tackling child poverty gets the attention that it requires both from Falkirk Council and from our national health service colleagues. A few years ago, we did some work in partnership with the NHS to look at data, which resulted in a diagram showing all the different referral pathways that exist. The work was very important for getting the issue on to the agenda throughout our organisations, and it has made quite a difference.
However, I add a word of caution. There is a real risk of going down a rabbit hole with data. You can spend a lot of time gathering an awful lot of data and, at the end of the day, say, “So, what are we going to do differently now that we’ve got all this data? Does it actually tell us anything that we didn’t know at the start?”
In Falkirk, we are making really good inroads into working out how we can use our local data to target our services appropriately and to match up different data sets so that we identify people who are missing out on benefits. We are doing things with our local data that are really useful on the ground. We are using the data to look at small or incremental changes—things that help small numbers of people but that help those people to get money that they were missing out on beforehand. All of that is absolutely the right stuff and we should be doing it.
We have done a lot of work on data, and I think we need to be cautious about how many more resources we put into looking at data when we do not necessarily have clarity of purpose or know what we will do at the end of the process. We need to make use of the data that we have, but I am cautious about how much more data collection we invest in.
Martin Booth wants to comment.
I come from a slightly different viewpoint. I was asked to take responsibility for the child poverty targets in Glasgow at around the time when the Scottish child payment came in. A councillor asked me whether it would make a significant difference and, if they doubled it, whether that would eradicate child poverty in Glasgow. The honest answer was that we did not know. We had an idea of the number of children living in poverty, but we had no idea of the depth of that poverty.
We therefore undertook some research, which we first published in February 2020 immediately before the lockdown—timing is everything—and we have repeated that data exercise every year since then. The most recent data is from the summer of this year. We therefore have a really good understanding of the levels of poverty and the areas and the kinds of family make-up in which people are more likely to be in poverty. We might have thought that we knew that, but we definitely know it now.
Our data is not 100 per cent accurate, because it is based on what we can access, such as data on council tax and housing benefit. We have had a really positive relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions. It has been more challenging with Social Security Scotland. We believe that the Scottish child payment is significantly underclaimed in Glasgow, but there are issues with that agency sharing data with us. The DWP has been very good at sharing data. However, there is a lot that we are allowed to use for research purposes but not for targeting—we know about families that are in difficulty, but we cannot legally use that data to access them. The data has allowed us to target individual wards. We know the wards that have the deepest levels of poverty and the wards with the most children that are on the verge of poverty. If we can carry out early intervention to prevent families from falling into crisis, that can make a big difference.
Having the data is really important, but having a wider data set and access to all the data would be really helpful, as would being able to use that data to target families that need help, rather than having to take a wildfire approach. The data has made a massive difference.
Thank you for those extremely helpful comments, Mr Booth. Are policies likely to be more successful in tackling child poverty if they tackle poverty in general? Implicit in what you have just told the committee is the idea that it is really about helping families to get out of poverty—which, by definition, helps children. Does the data that you have collected recently show that policies to tackle the overall level of poverty are best at tackling child poverty—on top of the child payment, obviously?
Mr Booth?
Sorry—I was just waiting to be unmuted.
That is a difficult question, because the situation is so complex. Clearly, children who live in poverty are in families, so it is about dealing with family poverty. A lot of our actions have been about trying to target families in particular.
We are in the fortunate position of being a pathfinder project with the Scottish Government, and within that we have strong allies who help us to break down some barriers and to have a more flexible approach to some funding. Some of that funding has been really helpful in recent years. The whole family wellbeing fund, for example, has made a real difference. I have been in local government for quite a long time, and we have been talking about early intervention for a very long time. It feels as though the whole family wellbeing fund is the first proper opportunity for early intervention.
In addition, through working closely with our colleagues on the employability side with the no one left behind funding, we have been supported by the Scottish Government in the flexible use of such resources to target families. That has allowed us to target families in the areas that we know are most likely to have people in child poverty—for example, families with lots of children, young children or a member who has a disability. Those are all driver areas, which we try to target. However, tying it down to specific instances is probably more difficult, because there are so many influencing factors.
I know that Peter Kelly wants to come in, but before he does that, I will be sneaky and ask a final question in this area. If I ask it now, our witnesses can respond to both questions and we can then move on to the next line of questioning.
Peter, if you have any reflections on Ms Smith’s question, it would be good to hear them, but I also have a question about the consequences of not implementing the act at a local level. I do not really like the word “consequences”, but is there a belief that the act is being implemented right across Scotland at a local level? If there is evidence that it is not, what should happen next? That is perhaps a better way of phrasing the question, but I know that you wanted to come in on the original question, too.
Yes—I want to respond to Liz Smith’s question, because it is a fundamental question about our approach to tackling child poverty. There is an old saying—a data person will probably tell me that it is wrong—that there are no poor children in rich families. We tackle child poverty by tackling family poverty, and we do that through a variety of interventions. As Martin Booth said, we cannot focus just on efforts that are directed solely at children; we have to think about the employability piece with regard to parents, the efforts to increase the number of jobs that pay at least the real living wage and so on. They are all part of the general effort to tackle child poverty. It is difficult to tease all of that out, which is why the efforts that some local authorities and health boards have made to integrate their child poverty action reports into wider reports can be quite helpful.
On the question of consequences for not producing reports, that is the main responsibility when it comes to implementing the act. We need to be very clear that local authorities and health boards across Scotland have engaged very actively in the process. Clearly, there is variation in the approach that has been taken across the country, but that is almost to be expected, given the ways in which the act has been framed and the guidance has developed and changed over the years since the bill was passed. We expect a degree of local variation in the way in which local authorities and health boards report on what they are doing to tackle child poverty.
There have been very few instances of a complete lack of engagement, or non-reporting. However, where that happens, we need to understand what lies behind it. One of the challenges with the process is that, very often, it has been an internal reporting mechanism—a report goes to councillors or senior officials in the health board, it is signed off, and that is the end of the matter. Some local authorities have been more creative in using the local child poverty action report as part of the effort to galvanise and build action around child poverty and to be more public about it.
Where local authorities or health boards are not meeting the responsibility to report, that needs to be investigated, at the very least. I do not know whether such a matter needs to go to this committee in Parliament so that questions can be asked of those local authorities, but it needs to be investigated. The Improvement Service certainly provides a good deal of support, and it has tried to do that in a very positive and encouraging way. The national partners recognise the challenges that the public sector experiences; indeed, we talked about that in response to the opening question with regard to resources.
If there is a failure to comply with what are quite standard requests, we need to understand the reasons for that. Ultimately, it is for the Parliament and the committee to ask those questions if authorities are unable to deliver on their commitments to produce a report.
That is helpful. I am conscious that we are talking about reporting but it is as much about delivery and outcomes as it is about reporting. With that in mind, I hand back to Liz Smith, who I think has another question.
09:30
I have finished, convener.
Did you not want to ask about collaboration?
I can do, yes.
In response to the original questions, two or three of you flagged up that, when it comes to the use of data, it is important that local authorities can learn from one other. Is there sufficient collaboration across local authorities on addressing the issues? Mr Beswick, you are from Argyll and Bute, and I am sure that it is not as easy for you to collaborate as it is for those in the inner cities. Is the collaboration good enough?
I suggest that the greatest strength of the act and the response that it has prompted from us has been collaboration locally rather than between local authorities, as well as the use of the act as a focus to bring together partners across health, social care and the third sector to drive collaboration and collate experiences of what has worked well and whether the data has driven access, as we have discussed. Local sharing has been more important and, to link it to the previous questions, it has also been more important than the reporting function, albeit that reporting is useful in sharing that experience and providing focus through the organisation.
Would anybody else like to comment on how easy it is to get the various stakeholders to collaborate with you within the local authority that you run? How easy is it to get health boards and other stakeholders on the same page as you? Mr Booth, would you like to comment on that?
Collaboration has been a real positive of the act. I chair a local child poverty working group. The health and social care partnership sends a senior person to that, and education is also heavily involved. Indeed, all the council departments are heavily involved, along with a number of external agencies such as Clyde Gateway and Jobs and Business Glasgow. In fact, they are both leading on some of our pilot area works rather than the council. Locally, things have been positive and it feels as though everybody is pushing in the same direction.
As I said earlier, there is a mixed message from some of the national bodies about the amount of data sharing that we can get, but locally things have been very positive.
Evan Beswick and Sally Buchanan have indicated that they want to come in. The evidence so far is that the 2017 act and the efforts of local authorities and health boards are fostering better collaboration. If Evan or Sally have something to contradict that or to show that there are other challenges, it would be good to get it on the record. If not, we will move on to the next line of questioning.
I do not think that Sally wants to say anything. Evan, do you have any comments?
No.
That is helpful. Thank you. I hand over to Jeremy Balfour.
I want to follow on a wee bit from what my colleague was asking. To what extent has the 2017 act resulted in additional interventions at the local level to tackle child poverty that might not have been happening before the act was passed? What has changed as a result of the act?
I will start with Peter Kelly and then others can jump in, if that is okay.
We have seen a variety of efforts across the country to initiate and develop new approaches to tackling child poverty. Some of that has been driven by the dedicated resources that have been made available by Scottish Governments—that is, by new funding streams coming on and local authorities taking advantage of them.
Martin Booth mentioned the whole family wellbeing fund, which is obviously from Scottish Government. There is also the pathfinder initiative in Dundee, which I am a bit more familiar with. Those initiatives have been important in stimulating new approaches, which I would see as collaborations between the Scottish Government, local authorities and other partners at local level.
In Dundee, the pathfinder initiative is doing things and initiating approaches that would not have been there before. It has given local stakeholders the opportunity to act in different ways. That is evidence of how the 2017 act is facilitating the opportunity for new approaches.
However, a balance is needed when it comes to innovation and newness. Martin highlighted some of the excellent work that is going on in Glasgow—things that we know work, and that need to be scaled up. Income maximisation work is the bread and butter of anti-poverty work at local level. It still needs to happen, and it needs to be delivered at greater scale and greater pace.
Martin also mentioned the uptake of the Scottish child payment in Glasgow. There is more work to be done on some of those areas. It is about a balance between the need for innovation and new approaches, and the need to go further with some of the tried and tested approaches.
I do not know whether anyone else wants to come in.
Nobody else has indicated that they want to come in at the moment.
I think that Martin has just indicated that he wants to come in, with a wee wave.
Sally Buchanan has definitely indicated that she wants to come in. She has been a good witness in putting her request to speak into the box. We will take you first, Sally. [Laughter.]
Thank you for that.
Things are different for us around collaboration, including with our partners in the NHS. The 2017 act brought us together to work together. Through that, we have identified a number of specific areas where we can jointly target our services and tweak things to do that little bit more.
Particularly in relation to areas such as support for third trimester pregnancy and infant feeding, we are making sure that, between us and the NHS, we have a pathway and that support is available so that, for example, families, and particularly families with young children, have access to what they need in order to feed the kids.
The benefits and the new bits are those successful collaborations and targeting of services to ensure that people are getting what they need. Our health visitors and midwives are raising awareness of income maximisation services and doing direct referrals. They are bringing those services in and ensuring that families get what they are entitled to.
I highlight those additional benefits, collaborations and interventions. We have done some really successful stuff around infant feeding and third trimester pregnancy recently, as well as around a focus on our early years, where we have brought services to parents at a particular establishment, again, arising through that joint work and collaboration with the NHS and the third sector.
To build on the comments that Sally Buchanan made, a lot of the real challenges are about building a trusting relationship with people who need support. It is about how we deliver services and ensuring that we remove barriers to entry—or “threshold anxiety”, as some people call it.
We have a project through which we put financial inclusion support officers into schools, because some families do not see schools as a threatening place. Likewise, we provide financial advisers within GP practices in some of our most deprived communities.
One initiative that took place through our health and social care partnership involved grants that, previously, had been given out by a social worker. There is stigma attached to a social worker being involved with a family so, instead, we now allow our health visitors to give out some support grants. There is far less stigma that way, and it is a much faster process for getting families the support that they need in an emergency. It is about reducing those barriers to entry, or working together, to make a real difference and make it easy for families to access support.
The question is really important. It is about the tangible benefits that have come from the 2017 act. I will add a few specifics from an Argyll and Bute perspective.
There have been changes in the way in which we approach our consultation and engagement with children. The link in the 2017 act to specific other policy frameworks, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is important in that. Some of the co-production work that we have done specifically with children has been a change to what has happened on the ground, which has informed and helped our approach locally.
Secondly, I will mention the work of the welfare rights team in Argyll and Bute. In 2023-24, about £4.5 million of client gain has been supported by that team. Given that we are talking about reducing poverty, that is real money in people’s pockets that would not have happened without the work of that team. That is a real, tangible benefit.
Finally, the work that has been done through the 2017 act, and the focus that that has provided, has helped us in working with partners to communicate the importance of a specifically rural approach to poverty. The funding that has been delivered through the islands cost crisis emergency fund—about £1 million in the past year—has been valuable in tackling rural poverty.
Those are some specific examples.
I have a quick comment to follow Evan Beswick’s.
It is also about process innovation. Evan talked about co-production, and there has been a real movement in how that is done at local authority and health board level. That would not have happened without the 2017 act. There are lots of examples, such as Edinburgh’s process with the End Poverty Edinburgh group of citizens who influence the development of the plan; the work that is going on in Dundee; the innovative work on engagement in Aberdeenshire; and, similarly, in Dumfries and Galloway. That situation has undoubtedly been driven by the 2017 act, no question.
To go back to the project that you have been talking about, Peter, and to what we heard about in Argyll and Bute, I am interested to know whether we can point to evidence that the 2017 act is making a real difference to real families. I have heard people using lots of buzzwords and saying, “We’ll try and measure this—it is new,” but what evidence is being taken, or what data do we have, to say that the 2017 act is making a real difference to people in Glasgow, Argyll and Bute, Falkirk or wherever? Do we have that evidence? Is it being collected by the local authorities as we go along?
I will give a quick answer, because my colleagues are well placed to set out what is happening in their local authorities. We see evidence across the local child poverty action reports of where activities are making a difference. For example, as Evan Beswick just mentioned, additional gain is coming from welfare rights work, which is being given greater prominence and focus as a result of prioritisation through the existence of the 2017 act and its requirements on local stakeholders to produce such reports. I cannot go through those action reports line by line, but they are full of evidence that says where things are working.
We know that some of the big drivers have not been in local authorities’ favour over the past few years, and that has put a constraint on what can be done practically at a local level. However, what we see over and over again is that local authorities, in difficult circumstances, are trying to prioritise efforts to address poverty. They could arguably do more and have better prioritisation processes, but those efforts are on-going and absolutely genuine.
09:45
Sally Buchanan and Martin Booth want to come in. I will take Sally first.
I am conscious of the time, so I will be brief and highlight the impact that has directly arisen from collaboration between Falkirk Council and NHS Forth Valley. We have helped 78 people to get a welfare benefits gain of over £233,000 through our parental employment support fund over the past six months, and we have assisted 19 people who are in debt, providing support to manage over £133,000-worth of debt.
Six-month paid work placements in the NHS have been set up for 21 people, and a separate work academy has led to four people being offered jobs. Those are examples of collaborative work on employability between the council and NHS Forth Valley that I do not think would have happened if we did not have that focus on child poverty. Those families are moving into employment in a way that will make a difference to them.
From our data starting point of 2020, the number of children Glasgow who are in poverty has reduced, but fairly marginally. That is because of the other pressures on the system.
We produced the data because we were concerned that all of the indicators were suggesting that the levels of child poverty in Glasgow would significantly increase. Although things such as the Scottish child payment have undoubtedly made a difference, a lot of our interventions have also made a difference. However, the roll-out of universal credit has been a backward step in regard to reducing the levels of poverty.
Despite all of those things and the cost of living crisis, we have still managed to make progress. Without the interventions, the numbers would have been significantly worse than they are now, so a lot of work has been to stop making things worse. At the moment, that feels like a big success, but, in a more stable position, I hope that we can start to make inroads.
Thank you very much. I call Paul O’Kane.
I will follow on from many of those themes. The committee is trying to drill down beyond the data that has been collected and to look at targets
The 2017 act contains a number of national targets, and we are keen to understand their relevance in local areas—we have heard some points on that already. We are also keen to assess the extent to which local authorities feel that they can contribute to the national targets and whether it is the witnesses’ view that we are on track to meet some of them.
Can Martin Booth start on that? I am interested in what he said about the data that Glasgow City Council collects. What are your reflections on the targets?
It is fair to say that the whole of Scotland is not in the same starting position and Glasgow’s levels of poverty are significantly above the average. Having a national target helps to focus minds to see that we are all trying to achieve the same thing; we are all trying to reduce child poverty.
When I was given responsibility for the issue, I had a team working on it that was very committed to making a difference, and part of the issue, and one of my concerns, was that the data might show that things were getting worse, despite the team’s efforts. That is why it was about motivating and understanding.
At the moment, our motivation is not so much to meet the national targets as it is to reduce the depth of poverty faced by those who are in poverty; it is also about trying to prevent families from falling into poverty, given the impacts of that on a number of service areas. That is really challenging. It does not feel as if we are making a massive contribution to meeting the national targets, but having them is important because it focuses minds.
Would anyone else like to comment?
Evan Beswick has indicated that he would like to.
There is a bit of a line through to questions about how easy it has been to bring partners to the table and about action on local authorities that may not have engaged in the same way.
Local teams are driven to respond to the act because there is strong, strategic alignment with what they see every day in terms of the impact on children and families and what we are trying to achieve as a health and social care partnership. From my perspective, we are trying to move to a more proactive, preventative model, while recognising all the social determinants of poor health and poor life circumstances.
That is very much pushing at an open door, and it has been very easy to bring partners to the table. I am the chief officer and chair of the Argyll and Bute child poverty action group, and I think that the act and the national focus have supported that multi-organisational approach.
Having the national targets has been important. I suggest that they have probably been more important nationally in maintaining a focus in potentially diversionary circumstances, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. We have kept that focus. They have also been important in supporting a response to requests for funding. Funding makes a difference. I mentioned the rural funding that had been received, which we are using to support rural fuel poverty.
Locally, the target does not drive the action; the target is the benefit that can come out of tackling child poverty and how that strategically aligns to what we are trying to achieve locally.
Peter Kelly, what is your view on the interplay between national targets and local contexts? As I referenced in my opening question, there are concerns about missing the interim target and then missing the longer-term target. Might it be helpful for the Poverty Alliance to have a national role in that?
Picking up what Martin Booth said about overall targets focusing minds and focusing efforts, we have seen that right across the country, despite his point about not everyone starting at the same place. Dundee has set some very ambitious targets in its report on reducing child poverty, but it is not starting from the same place as East Renfrewshire, for example.
How those targets play out in specific local authorities and how they can be a motivating factor, or perhaps a demotivating factor if the task seems too great, is still important. The question whether we are on track is a different one. According to the Poverty and Inequality Commission, we are not on track to meet our 2030 targets, which is really concerning.
The responsibility for that is a shared one, obviously, but I think that the Scottish Government could be doing more to make sure that, going into the next child poverty delivery plan, we are more focused on reaching the targets. We will have to do more through reducing costs and increasing incomes through social security and through work.
We have been through some horrendous times over the past four years with Covid and the cost of living crisis, but the targets that have been set are not just for when the economy is working well and everything is going well; they are there to focus minds to redouble efforts when things are difficult.
We are very supportive of the existence of targets, which are needed in any anti-poverty strategy at national or local level.
I will ask Martin Booth a brief supplementary question. I am interested in what you said about having a very committed team that has had success on the ground, but the data then having gone in a different direction because the team is blown off course by other factors. Before I ask my question, which is about the UK Government, I make it clear that there is a shared responsibility, and that the Scottish Government has to do more, too.
Glasgow City Council operates the private rented sector hub, and a reported 1,400 families affected by the benefit cap were supported by it between 2019 and June 2023 to help them to sustain tenancies or move into sustainable housing options. Factors such as the local housing allowance freeze and other benefits issues can impact success on the ground. How do you report that? I know that Glasgow CIty Council does not want to make excuses, but I want to quantify how much more you could have done had all things been equal, and had you not been blown off course because of either Scottish or UK policy decisions. How do you factor that into the work of Glasgow City Council?
I do not think that we specifically factor it in, although we are very aware of it in the background. We are far more focused on trying to make things better than we are on the reason why something has occurred. Housing specialists from some of our registered social landlord partners are in our Glasgow Helps team so that they can build their knowledge and can deal with issues when they come up. We try to have a no wrong door approach so that, if someone comes in, we do not pass them to another provider to deal with their query—we try to deal with everything in one place.
My apologies—I cannot easily answer your question on how we quantify the impact of any negative factors.
I suppose that I was asking it as a way of showing appreciation for the work that happens on the ground, which I am conscious of.
Sally Buchanan, I apologise that I am not going to be able to get to you, because I have broken my own rule, which is that I have asked an additional question that did not have to be asked. I have been told that we have until 10 past 10 to dispose of the questions. I have been a bad chair.
Good morning. It is quite clear from the discussion that the 2017 act has led to improvements in the availability of local data on child poverty. I want to give folk the opportunity to make additional comments on that if they want to. I will go to Peter Kelly first.
I reflect the comments that we rehearsed earlier. Clearly, there have been greater efforts to use local data. In addition to some of the examples that Martin Booth provided, a range of local authorities have done their own surveys of individuals to assess their experiences of poverty, and so on. Great efforts have been made by local partners across the piece to gather both qualitative and quantitative data that tells us how the experience of poverty is changing, and to use that data more creatively to feed into an understanding of what has changed and what needs to change. There have been efforts in West Lothian and West Dunbartonshire to understand the experiential aspects of poverty and how they can be integrated into strategy development. It is important that we have the qualitative data, rather than just having a focus on the harder, more quantitative stuff.
No one else wants to come in, so I will go back to Marie McNair.
I am interested in the examples that Mr Booth gave of how Glasgow City Council changed local policies in response to insights from local data on child poverty. Glasgow’s report says that you are making progress on ensuring that that data informs policy. Can you comment on examples that arise from the data? How are you sharing the data not only inside the council, but outside the council with key partners?
10:00
On the second part of your question, we have a child poverty action group that all our partner agencies are involved with. We publish the data in reports—this year’s is called “Child Poverty in Glasgow 2024”—which we take to committee to ensure that it is shared across the council.
On examples that arise from the data, I can talk about one of my biggest frustrations. The data on children who are entitled to the school footwear and clothing grant is driven by data that we hold, because it is driven by council tax and housing benefit-type data. We can automate the payments of that grant; we automatically pay about 95 per cent of the families of children who are entitled to that money—they do not have to apply. It is only the families of children who fall through the system who have to apply. We cannot do that with other education-based benefits, because the criteria for free school meals and education maintenance allowance are different from the criteria for the school clothing grant. To me, if you need a school clothing grant, you need free school meals as well and, if you are of the appropriate age, you also need an education maintenance allowance. If we could simplify the system and the structure, we could make that process a lot easier. We would have a much better take-up rate if we had control of that, because we could force those payments out. Those sorts of things would allow us to make an even bigger difference.
I said that we think that the Scottish child payment is about 25 per cent underclaimed. It would make a massive difference to families in Glasgow if we could get the claimant rate up to 100 per cent, but we need the data to do that. There are things that could be done to make a difference, and the plea would be to encourage other agencies to share and simplify the data and to standardise things.
I am quite alarmed to hear about the uptake of the Scottish child payment in Glasgow, so you might have a Glasgow MSP reaching out to you very soon. Before I bring in Paul O’Kane, Sally Buchanan would like to come in.
On social security and the uptake of the Scottish child payment, there is an opportunity at a national level to look at a data-sharing agreement. There is no need for us to do that work 32 times. If we worked together and had a data-sharing agreement, we could do much better targeting and improve the uptake rate.
Thank you for saving us time. Paul O’Kane immediately nodded his head when you spoke, because that was the substance of his follow-up question. Thank you for that, because we now have a clear understanding.
Good morning. I am a bit alarmed by some of the information that I have heard this morning. Martin Booth mentioned that the Scottish child payment is 25 per cent underclaimed and that we need to simplify the system so that the school clothing grant and free school meals can be claimed together. Sally Buchanan referred to a data-sharing agreement and Peter Kelly said that income maximisation needs to be rolled out at greater pace. In order to tackle those and other issues, what further support is required from the Improvement Service’s national partners group so that local partners can be more effective in tackling child poverty?
I do not think that the things that we have spoken about are in the Improvement Service’s gift. The Improvement Service is a valuable support across local government. Sally raised the need for a data-sharing agreement with Social Security Scotland. We would use that data only for good—to ensure that families claim the Scottish child payment. I am not sure what lever would make that happen, but I do not think that it is for the Improvement Service to do that; I think that that would need to be done by Government.
Likewise, the criteria for education-based benefits are set by legislation. Why are the criteria for those benefits not all the same?
I noted that the Child Poverty Action Group said that we need
“More detailed guidance on the expected role of local partners”
and a method for measuring success at a local level. Are such things in the gift of the Improvement Service’s national partners group?
Again, I think that that is about standardisation. We have really good buy-in from all our local partners. This is not about trying to coerce the willing. Everybody is willing and everybody understands that this is probably the biggest single challenge for our society. All the partners—whether that is RSLs, the third sector or other agencies—are prepared to work, and are working, together on that, so the co-ordination of the work is really good. There are different problems in different areas, which is maybe why it is difficult to do national comparisons.
There were two parts to the question. On the support that the Improvement Service and the national partners group can provide, the Improvement Service is given dedicated funding to deliver the child poverty co-ordinator role and to provide support to local authorities on that. We have talked about resources for local authorities and health boards to produce the reports. The resource that is available for national support is limited.
The Scottish poverty and inequality research unit at Glasgow Caledonian University also provides a bit of support, and, where that is taken up by local authorities, it is well received. I have been involved in what we call the self-assessment process. That process is on-going in West Dunbartonshire and colleagues from the national partners group are providing support where we can so that local authorities and health boards can identify the kind of external input and support that they might need. However, that resource is relatively limited.
We have been through various iterations of the guidance to local partners on how their local child poverty action reports should be produced. I am sure that there will be further iterations of the guidance in order to make it as clear as possible but also to reflect the diversity of approaches that the 2017 act is trying to encourage and which are probably necessary. The needs that Evan Beswick has described are very different from those that Martin Booth has described, so the approach needs to be flexible. However, we must be clear about how we are measuring success, using data and involving people with lived experience. We can provide guidance on how those things can be improved.
That completes our evidence session. The clerks will be happy that we almost got through on time. I thank all our witnesses for joining us. That felt like a discussion, rather than an evidence session, and it was really useful. Thank you for your efforts in helping us with our post-legislative scrutiny—it is very much appreciated.
Next week, the committee will take evidence from organisations that campaigned for the 2017 act and some oversight bodies.
I briefly suspend the meeting to set up for the next item of business.
10:09 Meeting suspended.