Question:
The Council launched its anti poverty strategy in May 2022. Over the last year and a half, please can you share how many residents have been lifted out of poverty and prevented from falling into poverty?
Minutes:
Question:
The Council launched its anti-poverty strategy in May 2022. Over the last year and a half, please can you share how many residents have been lifted out of poverty and prevented from falling into poverty?
Answer:
Thank you for your question, Laura.
I’m afraid that even the UK’s national government, and the Office for National Statistics, is unable to provide this kind of information.
The Tackling Poverty Strategy explains how we will measure progress towards our long term goal of ending poverty in the Borough. I brought a detailed report to the Executive in March 2023.
Examples of the impact so far:
· Resident income gains of well over a million pounds through advice and debt writeoff partly due to the additional debt adviser
· A 500% increase in visits to the cost of living help hub, hugely increasing the number of people able to access the help they need.
· £1.5 million of government emergency funding distributed using the Hardship Alliance, who offered additional help to thousands of residents who most needed it.
We have also finished the homes for homeless people at Grovelands, kept social housing rents low, funded the council tax reduction scheme, and made a £250,000 Hardship Fund available to fund long term projects.
It is a lot but it would be very premature to talk about ending poverty as a result.
I am concerned that your question indicates that that the Conservative group is seriously underestimating the work needed to end poverty in the Wokingham Borough. Thousands of Wokingham residents are now unable to pay for basic essentials. If we take just one group – those receiving Universal Credit, each single recipient has an income £35 / week lower than what they need to survive. That’s an estimated shortfall in income of £12 million a year just for Wokingham residents on Universal Credit. That is not a shortfall that Wokingham Borough Council can bridge on its own. This is the tip of the iceberg. Residents have been hammered financially over the last 18 months. Global problems have been exacerbated by disastrous Conservative policy on Brexit and the economy. Food prices are rising steeply.
Thanks to the Liz Truss budget thousands of those with mortgages will be paying an average of £4,800 a year more, with rents also skyrocketing. To end poverty in Wokingham, we need a national government which is serious about ending poverty and that means a change of national government as soon as possible.
Supplementary Question:
Thank you, Rachel, for your answer however disappointing it may be to blame the Government, as if it is a bingo thing popping up.
My question was really focused on how do we know we are going in the right direction and the good work that is being done, because there is good work being done – the Council, the charities, resources are being put in. That is not in doubt. It is how do we know we are actually getting the aim of the Anti Poverty Strategy realised, which is all about prevention and getting people out of poverty locally in this Borough. We cannot control national things. We can control local things, so what data are we using from our own charities that we are in partnership with, from the own data we have got as a Council, to know that actually we are on the right track, what data are we using there?
Supplementary Answer:
So, as I mentioned earlier, I brought a very detailed report to the Executive in March 2023. We are going to be continuing to provide those reports on a regular basis. We have created an equality profile along with eight other Borough profiles. These are going to be shared by the end of October 2023. Updates of other data based on the census information are also being developed. These are going to provide us with a better understanding of the base line measurements going forwards. Some of the information in the Tackling Poverty Strategy lays out on page 12 and 13, how we are going to measure the success of the policy going forward. This includes information, which is available on a regular basis, so the number of children on free school meals, that is something which is one of our KPIs and that comes to Overview and Scrutiny on a regular basis, and the number of people on the Healthy Start initiative, that comes out on a monthly basis. I am talking to the officers at the moment about how we can improve the way we report on this, but there is a lot of information out there and it is reported on a regular basis.