Question
Individuals and families living in poverty are not identified as one of the nine protected characteristics under the Equalities Act of 2010. However, Council decisions and actions often impact on individuals and families – frequently offering vital practical support, but sometimes in ways that could potentially cause harms and unintended consequences. Is there a process, perhaps something similar to the our Borough Equalities Impact Assessments, that WBC can apply to ensure that impacts of WBC policy proposals and actions on the poorest in our community will be explicitly considered, documented and given a significant weighting in the policy making process?
Minutes:
Question
Individuals and families living in poverty are not identified as one of the nine protected characteristics under the Equalities Act of 2010. However, Council decisions and actions often impact on individuals and families – frequently offering vital practical support, but sometimes in ways that could potentially cause harms and unintended consequences. Is there a process, perhaps something similar to the our Borough Equalities Impact Assessments, that WBC can apply to ensure that impacts of WBC policy proposals and actions on the poorest in our community will be explicitly considered, documented and given a significant weighting in the policy making process?
Answer
Poverty is a terrible blight and it is vital that it remains in the forefront of our thinking, in particular as the impact of Covid-19 continues to be felt on all our economy, and so I am grateful to you for this question.
There is a fundamental difference between the protected characteristics you mention and poverty, which is that we will always aim to eradicate poverty. To prevent it and help people out of it. Whereas the nine characteristics are to be protected at the least and, in many ways, to be cherished and celebrated. This means the two things are in different categories and must be considered differently.
But, in other ways, your point is valid. In particular, we recognise the need to understand poverty better so as to guide our policies appropriately. We need to know of its causes so that we can: prevent it; its impacts so that we can mitigate them; and its escape routes so that we can support people through them.
That is why we are developing our bank of local insight and knowledge to understand the complexity of poverty in the Borough so that this understanding can drive more informed decision and policy making and reinforce our approach to this complex issue.
We are not starting from scratch with this; the Council’s Community Engagement Team (previously the Community Development Workers) have for many years operated in our more deprived areas, building up invaluable local contacts and understanding as well as supporting people and neighbourhoods to become stronger and more self-sufficient. And we have also always sought to prevent, mitigate and tackle poverty in practical ways. For example through the work of the Early Help Team with targeted families, by providing food bank vouchers and by back-to-work and employment advice and support.
So our work on poverty will be guided by this combination of on-the-ground knowledge, data analysis and existing good practice in order to better respond to what we know will be a growing issue due to the impact of Covid-19 already mentioned.
Supplementary Question
Unfortunately, as you stated the pandemic means that it is likely that poverty is going to rise further in our Borough. You have mentioned the Community Engagement Team and the Early Help Team but where within the WBC organisational chart does monitoring of poverty levels and the impacts of WBC’s policies and action on poverty, currently sit? If possible, can you please provide the name of a specific Officer and/or role with primary responsibility for this activity?
Supplementary Answer
I think within the arrangements that we are now just about to put in place again for the second wave, I think that the Officer who would be responsible for poverty would be the Chief Executive and the Councillor would be myself.
We are very alive to the issue that as we go into the second wave, there will be parts of the community which will suffer more than others, and we have to be on that case all the time. So Andrew it is a very pertinent question and which we are considering all the time now that we are in the second wave.