Social Services Strategic Planning
Gloucester Anti-poverty Strategy
A Review
By Mike Williams and Keith Fletcher
Commissioned by Gloucester City Council on behalf of the Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance
June 2000
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Preface
A study like this is heavily dependant on the goodwill and support of the people who actually do the business. We can say without hesitation that the people we spoke to could not have been more helpful. They were, without exception, generous with information and open and undefensive in the way they shared their views and ideas. We are grateful to all of them and very much hope that they find them properly reflected in the report which follows.
A special word of thanks is due to Sue Oppenheimer, to the three members of the steering group Alison Kite, Helen Hughes and Andy Jarrett for their support and advice throughout the review and to the members of the Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance whose thoughtful reflections on the draft report was a great help to us in framing our final conclusions.
Mike Williams & Keith Fletcher
June 2000
Gloucester Anti-poverty Strategy A Review
The Health Improvement Programme to contain the Plan
Implementing the Social Inclusion Plan
A City wide reference group for the voluntary and community sectors
Poverty and Social Inclusion - the changing policy context
The Health improvement Programme to contain the Plan
Implementing the Social Inclusion Plan
A City wide reference group for the voluntary and community sectors
Should such a Group have a county-wide or city remit?
How should such a body be resourced?
A City wide Plan for Social Inclusion
Poverty and Social Inclusion - the changing policy context: rather than attempting to redraft or update its anti-poverty strategy, the City Council should collaborate with others to make the reduction of poverty a subset of a broad social inclusion strategy.
The Health Improvement Programme to contain the Plan
The Health Improvement Programme and its supporting structure is widely accepted in Gloucester as of growing value in co-ordinating public policy. It should therefore be recognised explicitly as the principal vehicle for the co-ordination of policy on social inclusion in the City for the immediate future
Subject:Implementing the Social Inclusion Plan
The only existing vehicle which could take on immediate responsibility for the co-ordination and implementation of the social inclusion strategy is the Locality Planning Team with its direct relationship to the HImP. We concluded that it should be mandated and resourced to take on that rôle.
A City wide reference group for the voluntary and community sectors
There is a need for a mechanism by which the statutory sector can interface with the community on health improvement matters. There is a general need for such a linkage and a specific need to link strategically to the Locality Planning Team. The voluntary and community sector is a natural intermediary.
The Group should focus on Gloucester City and its impact should be evaluated . If it is successful, a similar model could be rolled out into the other PCG areas.
We believe that this Group would be of sufficient strategic importance for it to be written into people's job descriptions. The remainder of the support package needs to be negotiated on the basis of clearly identified need. A budget would be necessary to commission tasks or to compensate member organisations if staff undertook the work themselves.
A mapping project of existing activity
A priority for the Locality Planning Team should be to map areas of special need and existing activity to promote social inclusion in Gloucester.
Voluntary and community organisations have the ability to articulate the reality of social exclusion. They are a valuable information resource for planners and have a vital contribution to make to the development of a strategic response.
The locus, rôle and membership of the Gloucester Anti-Poverty
Alliance is now very confused and cannot be resolved from within the group.
Another body needs to "own" it, give it explicit tasks, describe its membership
and the expectations it has of it if it is to continue. There could still
be much value in the networking and "forum" aspects of the Alliance and
it has provided the City with good advice about the use of its small budget.
But it needs a context. For many positive reasons of better cross agency
collaboration in the City that has become more and more tenuous in recent
months.
On 14th March 2000 the City of Gloucester appointed Social Services Strategic Planning to undertake a review of anti-poverty work in the City. The review was undertaken by Mike Williams of Partnership at Work and Keith Fletcher from SSSP. This is a report of that review.
At the initial meeting it was agreed that the review team would report on four issues.
The review comprised a number of telephone and face to face interviews with individuals and groups representing most of the major stakeholders (Annexe 1) and the analysis of a number of relevant papers and reports pertaining to aspects of poverty in the City. We also referred to examples of good practice elsewhere in the UK. Our sources are listed at Annexe 2. It is important to note that the review did not comprise any direct research into the extent of poverty in the City nor on the impact of the anti-poverty work which had been during the five year life of the Strategy. It is also important to note that all our sources are "second hand": time did not permit consultation directly with consumers.
The interviews were structured around a list of 12 questions (Annexe 3) but the style was informal and discursive. As they progressed we increasingly "thought aloud" about where the information was taking us in the hope that the participants' reflections and reactions would polish and refine our conclusions.
Finally a special meeting of the Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance met
to discuss the draft report on 25 May 2000 and we have incorporated the
additional comments which came out of that meeting.
There were varying degrees of awareness of, for example, the activities of GAPA but remarkably little dissent about the nature of the relevant issues.
About half the people we spoke to had had some involvement in GAPA. With only one partial dissent all of those who had been involved and several who had had no direct involvement recognised that it had advised on use of the small anti-poverty budget very well, had organised some valuable conferences, had set up two useful sub-groups and had established some lasting, if limited, initiatives.
Attenders, with only one exception saw themselves as there in a personal rather than a representative capacity and the majority thought that GAPA had lost its way in recent months. There was general agreement about a lack of rôle clarity among those who attended and a very confused perception of its rôle among (non-attending) senior officers in the City Council. But none of them saw it as the custodian of the City's anti-poverty strategy, the original terms of reference.
The broadest range of opinion was about the need for a strategic body to oversee social inclusion. The great majority thought such a function was needed but opinion was divided about how it should be achieved. Some people thought a separate body was needed; the majority thought that sufficient movement was taking place among existing inter-agency fora for it to become a function of one of them. Almost everyone thought that GAPA, however reconstituted, could not achieve it.
There was a widespread view that great strides had been made within
the past eighteen months to establish inter-agency joint planning, where
little had existed before. There was a general mood of optimism, enthusiasm
and goodwill. There was also a fairly general recognition that, so far,
this development had made only superficial inroads into significant dialogue
with the voluntary sector and with local communities. Some groups, notably
the ethnic minorities, were particularly marginalised.
There is a great deal of "anti-poverty" work going on in the City, by the City Council, by the voluntary sector, much of it supported by the City, and by the health agencies. The voluntary and community sector's contribution is not fully understood, nor is it necessarily integrated into statutory sector strategy. The other statutory agencies working within the City also address poverty and exclusion within their strategic statements and in partnership with the City. The Education Achievement Zone work (with the schools) and the Community Safety Strategy (with the Police and the County Council) are examples of this in practice.
There is an Anti-Poverty Strategy in existence which was adopted by the City Council in 1995. It is an excellent statement of principle but, with the perspective of five years, it suffers from three weaknesses.
Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance
In order to provide a mechanism to drive the Strategy the City Council established the Anti-Poverty Alliance (GAPA) late in 1996. Our brief describes its functions as "to develop an inter-agency approach" and "to make recommendations on the use of the City Council's anti-poverty budget". But the original terms of reference were comprehensive and strategic. They indicated a wide angle remit to monitor and co-ordinate "the policies and services of service providers in Gloucester." The proposed membership in the terms of reference was for representation from a very broad range of statutory and voluntary agencies working in the City.
The Council's anti-poverty budget, as such, has been a very modest sum ranging from £25,000 in the first year to £10,000 at its lowest. GAPA has indeed advised the City on the use of this budget and as a result it has been outstandingly well targeted producing real and sustainable gains out of all proportion to the small costs involved.
GAPA has never achieved the original strategic vision. Outside the Economic and Social Development Unit (GESDU) it is not widely seen to have this rôle, even among other senior officers in the City Council. Its focus is seen by them as enabling the partnership between the City and voluntary sector to focus on poverty rather than to provide a critique of the City's own services; let alone those of the other agencies.
Given this perception of its function it is not surprising that a process of systematic evaluation and feedback has not developed.
Poverty or social inclusion, sometimes both, are key foci for several other cross cutting bodies.
Finally the local authorities in Gloucestershire have recently agreed
in principle to establish a County Chamber for Gloucestershire. The proposals
are still in draft but one of the six key functions suggested for the Chamber
is "to debate, contribute to and advocate appropriate integrated strategies
for the county."
A City wide Plan for Social Inclusion
Poverty and Social Inclusion - the changing policy context
Poverty is corrosive and deeply destructive, especially in the midst of relative affluence. And its impact and that of social exclusion on health inequalities has been widely acknowledged following the Aitchison Report. But, as a concept, poverty has always suffered problems of definition. Many people, including the last Government at one stage, deny its very existence in Britain. Perhaps it is for that reason, as much as any other, that it has been impossible to gain a co-ordinated and strategic grip on the subject: because it is seen in different ways by different people.
But social inclusion is a different matter. We take it to be common ground among the statutory and voluntary bodies working in the City that many of its citizens are excluded from full and active citizenship. For some their exclusion arises from their personal circumstances which require active governance to redress. Others are excluded partly as an outcome of the acts of the public agencies themselves.
In the first case people with learning difficulties and physical disabilities, for example, require (different) special measures to enable them to participate fully in community life. In the second case the decision to exclude a child from school or to evict a social housing tenant may have its own rationale but a by-product of the decision is explicitly to exclude.
Poverty itself may cause or exacerbate exclusion but if the aim of public policy is to generate a more inclusive society some of the less productive definitional problems about what is and what is not poverty can be avoided.
A second reason to use social inclusion as a major public policy address is that it is already a key Government initiative. It is a test of Best Value for local government and of the effectiveness of primary care for the NHS. For the voluntary sector it is a key indicator for the release of European and Exchequer resources. It unequivocally embraces equal opportunity, health, education, living conditions, justice and community safety as well as money and resource poverty. With economic regeneration and sustainability it is the third leg of the tripod on which all public policy rests.
As if to emphasise this a development paper on neighbourhood regeneration has been released by the relevant DETR Policy Action Team within the last few weeks. The ideas and process it advocates are so directly germane to our own conclusions that we have appended an extract from that paper to the report (Annexe 4).
Our first conclusion is that, rather than attempting to redraft or update its anti-poverty strategy, the City Council should collaborate with others to make the reduction of poverty a subset of a broad social inclusion strategy.
The Health improvement Programme to contain the Plan
A history of conflict between the City and the County over the specific issue of unitary status has not helped to promote a joint approach between the two towards such issues as the development of an anti-poverty strategy. There is also an ongoing tension at political level about the appropriate distribution of resources between the City and the rest of the County.
Our sense however is that these barriers are gradually breaking down at critical crossover points. Important collaborative mechanisms, such as the Health Improvement Programme for Gloucestershire, are beginning to develop into joint strategies. We have concluded that including social inclusion as a common strategic agenda would help in the rapid consolidation of these developments.
In order to give effect to that the HImP managers will need to collaborate with other planning bodies such as the Community Safety Strategy. Social exclusion and joint approaches to address its health consequences has been explicitly adopted as a priority in the 2000-2003 HImP. The priorities in that report are as follows.
• Begin to apply the Oxford Indicators of Deprivation in the planning of antipoverty work within the county.
• Continue to explore the development of local indicators of poverty particularly with respect to inequalities in health.
The full statement on social exclusion is added as an Appendix. (Annexe 5)
Our second conclusion is that the Health Improvement Programme and its supporting structure is widely accepted in Gloucester as of growing value in co-ordinating public policy. It should therefore be recognised explicitly as the principal vehicle for the co-ordination of policy on social inclusion in the City for the immediate future
Implementing the Social Inclusion Plan
There is a need for a strategic plan for social inclusion in the City but, given all the existing inter-agency and multi-disciplinary bodies which have poverty, social inclusion/exclusion as part of their remit does Gloucester need another body to provide it? Many of the people we spoke to felt overwhelmed by an endless cycle of meetings. Many of them are concerned with poverty, inequality, injustice, ill health or poor educational opportunity and attainment: the components of social exclusion. But though social inclusion is part of the remit of all it has not been the single primary purpose of any.
Among the groups most closely focused on social inclusion are GAPA itself and its two sub-groups, on welfare benefits and on health. In all but name the two sub groups are now completely separate from GAPA. There is a diocesan group on poverty but none of the people we spoke to knew much about its activities. We could find no evidence of cross referencing among these groups.
There is a senior officers' group from the statutory agencies now recently refocused and renamed The Social Justice Group. Our first thought was that this group would be well placed to implement the plan but it has yet to establish its credibility and authority sufficiently to be able to deliver the collaboration of the wide spectrum of agencies which would need to be committed to it. It is currently considering its role in relation to the HImP and Healthy Gloucestershire and could eventually take on the rôle; but not at present.
The only existing vehicle which could take on immediate responsibility for the co-ordination and implementation of the social inclusion strategy is the Locality Planning Team with its direct relationship to the HImP. We concluded that it should be mandated and resourced to take on that rôle.
A City wide reference group for the voluntary and community sectors
Gloucester has a strong tradition of social care, goodwill and support for voluntary activity. In spite of that a culture of collaboration in the development of public policy, "joined up government", is not strong. The public services have had a tendency to define problems in institutional rather than community terms.
Some of the voluntary people we spoke to felt marginalised. They felt their efforts were not understood and the people they represent were not sufficiently visible, and therefore not consulted, in the deliberations which create public policy. This is perhaps especially true of the ethnic minorities in the City.
The sense of being marginalised is well articulated in the voluntary sector report of a seminar held in late 1999. "In Gloucestershire the statutory requirement for voluntary sector representation on the JCC has been valuable, but the voluntary sector’s input and impact have been limited by the lack of resources and support for representatives, and the resulting gap in accountability and consultation mechanisms. Commitment to voluntary/community sector representation across the county on LPTs and other parts of the joint planning structure, is patchy, uneven or non-existent. Much of the voluntary/community sector has had no involvement in joint planning to date, and service users and carers have largely been excluded."
Our interviews bear this out. Fortunately the perception is not confined to the voluntary sector itself. There is a growing recognition among officers and members that this has happened in the past and there is a commitment to change it. The situation is changing, but still rather slowly.
There are practical difficulties for the statutory authorities in communicating with the communities they serve. This is acknowledged in the 1999 Director of Public Health's Report under the twin headings of "self esteem and empowerment" and "community involvement" quoted below.
ISSUES OF SELF ESTEEM AND EMPOWERMENT
It is important for all parties to recognise that such a group cannot "represent the voluntary and community sector". It should not be seen as an easy way to tick the box of voluntary sector partnership. The group can, however, be representative of those parts of the voluntary and community sector which have an interest in social inclusion.
Should such a Group have a county-wide or city remit?
The statistics in the Director of Public Health's Report in 1998 clearly show that the main concentrations of deprivation and social exclusion are in the City of Gloucester. It also acknowledges the importance of social exclusion outside the city. There are pockets of deprivation in even the most affluent areas of the County. The situation in the city is recognised in the draft HImP for 2000-2003.
We believe that this Group would be of sufficient strategic importance for it to be written into people's job descriptions. The remainder of the support package needs to be negotiated on the basis of clearly identified need. A budget would be necessary to commission tasks or to compensate member organisations if staff undertook the work themselves.
The Group would need to establish itself quickly as a credible player with something useful to contribute. Some of the existing social inclusion effort would almost certainly benefit from a further review to consider how it might make a more effective contribution to the development of a city wide social inclusion strategy.
A mapping project of existing activity
An effective strategy must be based on good information. Information about deprivation and social exclusion is not as good as it should be. This deficiency is not unique to Gloucester. Historically, information has been gathered at ward level. This tends to mask pockets of deprivation in otherwise relatively affluent areas.
We conclude that a priority for the Locality Planning Team should be to map areas of special need and existing activity to promote social inclusion in Gloucester.
They should commission an independent study to establish, as comprehensively as possible, the community, voluntary and corporate statutory activity which already exists and neighbourhoods and groups in need of special help and support.
Voluntary and community organisations have the ability to articulate the reality of social exclusion. They are a valuable information resource for planners and have a vital contribution to make to the development of a strategic response. The voluntary/community reference group should therefore lead on the way the map about voluntary/community activity is drawn and should participate fully in defining exclusion.
GAPA has provided a vehicle for consultation with (parts of) the voluntary sector about the use of a relatively small anti-poverty budget. No doubt it has also provided useful networking opportunities. As we noted above it has not provided a strategic forum but it has maintained the illusion of one.
Our understanding of the genesis of GAPA was to act as a vehicle to drive the (existing) anti-poverty strategy. Since that time the policy context has changed almost beyond recognition. Early in 1997 there were very few coherently organised opportunities to address exclusion and poverty. Now there are so many that they are in danger of diluting each other's impact unless they are well co-ordinated.
The people who attended the GAPA meeting to discuss the draft report were strongly of the view that GAPA should continue in existence, perhaps as a sub-group of the Locality Planning Team, in an operational rather than a strategic capacity. It should remain as a mechanism for channelling information to small groups and ensuring that their voices are heard. It should continue to initiate small scale innovative projects and work at street level. As such it would complement the voluntary sector strategic body and feed information into it.
There are several possibilities.
Mike Williams & Keith Fletcher
SSSP, June 2000
We spoke to the following people either face to face or by telephone (T) during the course of the review. We were unable to meet a few very important stakeholders for a variety of practical reasons but the following list represents a spread of views as broad as possible given the time available to us.
Lizzie Abderrahim, Manager, Citizens' Advice Bureau.
Ian Anderson, Assistant Director (Health Promotion) Gloucestershire HA
Bill Booth, Gloucester Law Centre (T)
Alison Cathles, Policy Development Officer, Social Services, Gloucestershire County
Dave Clegg, Head of Corporate Performance and Value, Gloucester City
Graham Garbutt, Chief Executive, Gloucester City
Ken Garland, Matson Neighbourhood Project (T)
Clarence Hosein, African Caribbean Association (T)
Helen Hughes, Director, Gloucester Council of Voluntary Service.
Alison Kite, Community Development Officer, GESDU
Phil Lane, Head of Renewal & Regeneration, GESDU.
Three Neighbourhood Project Co-ordinators (as a group)
Sue Oppenheimer, Head of Community Development, GESDU
Shirley Palmer, Co-ordinator, Linking Communities.
Sue Porter, Co-ordinator, Locality Planning Team.
Cllr. Mary Smith, Cabinet Member, Gloucester City Council
Penny Seaward, Gloucester Tenants Federation (T)
Paul Smith, Assistant Director, Development, Gloucester City
Dierdre Smouna, Business Development Manager, Community NHS Trust.
Ann Jarvis Wanklin, Community Development Manager, Primary Care Group.
The Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance
| Anti-Poverty Strategy (1995) | Gloucester City Council |
| Health Improvement Plan 1999-2000 | Gloucester Health Authority |
| Draft Health Improvement Plan 2000-2003 | Gloucester Health Authority |
| Director of Public Health Annual Report 1998 | Gloucester Health Authority |
| Director of Public Health Annual Report 1999 | Gloucester Health Authority |
| Draft Children's Services Plan 2000-2003 | Gloucestershire Social Services |
| Gloucester Community Profile 1998 | Gloucestershire Labour Market Information Unit |
| The Economy of Gloucestershire 1999 | Gloucestershire Labour Market Information Unit |
| Economic Development Strategy 2000-2001 | Gloucester City Council |
| Gloucester Economic Strategy First Review 1999-2002 | Gloucestershire Development Agency |
| Poverty In Gloucestershire | (1991 Census data) |
| A Profile of Poverty in Gloucestershire (1998) | Gloucestershire County Council |
| Deprivation Issues in Gloucester (1999) | Gloucester City Council |
| Anti-Poverty Seminar - Review of Progress on Targets (1998) | City Council Community Development Team |
| Notes on the Anti-poverty and Community -Development Seminar (May 1997) | City Council Community Development Team |
| Community Development Strategy (1996) | Gloucester City Council |
| Voluntary/Community Sector Recommendations on the Future of Partnership Working in Gloucestershire (1999) | Voluntary Sector Joint Planning Steering Group |
| Best Value Performance Plan 2000/2001 | Gloucester City Council |
| New Directions for Gloucester - City Plan 2000 | Gloucester City Council |
| A County Chamber for Gloucestershire discussion draft (2000) | Local Government Association
Gloucestershire Branch |
| Taking the County Council' Anti-Poverty Strategy Forward (1997) | Gloucestershire County Council policy paper |
| The New Agenda research paper examining the implication of government policies for Gloucester City Council (2000) | Gloucester City Council |
Review of anti-poverty
work in Gloucester
Questions to address
SSSP, March 2000
EXTRACT FROM "JOINING IT UP LOCALLY" - REPORT OF POLICY ACTION TEAM 17, DETR, 2000
The problem of poor neighbourhoods is not a new one. Successive governments have tried to address it in various ways. Attempts to encourage local joint action have often been part of this.
There have been some successes, but there is little evidence that government intervention has resulted in a sustained narrowing of the gap between the poorest areas and the rest. Nor indeed has that been an explicit objective of past policy.
There are a number of reasons for this. Some of these are outside our remit – such as structural economic decline. But many are about failures to generate effective joint working. For instance, past attempts at joint-working have foundered because:
Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs)
A mechanism is needed at the local authority level to encourage core public services to work with each other, local residents, and the community, voluntary and private sectors to improve outcomes in deprived neighbourhoods. Our vision is that this role would be played by Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs).
These would work in very different ways in different places. But there would be five common steps that each would take in drawing up a strategic response to local neighbourhood deprivation. They would:
There would also be particular issues that LSPs would be expected to address, within this very broad framework. These would include:
E3.7 Poverty and Social Exclusion - extracted from 2000-2003 HImP
Why is this a priority?
• Poverty, social exclusion and isolation have all been linked to ill-health.
• These areas, which are likely to exhibit ill health related to poverty, include both urban and isolated rural areas and areas in which there are high concentrations of older people.
• Update of Poverty Profile
• A number of credit unions have been established within the county.
• Fair shares schemes established.
• Benefit take-up campaigns conducted.
• Lifelong learning initiatives.
• Discussions of local indicators of poverty.
Priorities 2000-03
• Begin to apply the Oxford Indicators of Deprivation in the planning of antipoverty work within the county.
• Continue to explore the development of local indicators of poverty particularly with respect to inequalities in health.
Connecting documents
• Social Exclusion Unit Documents
• A Profile of Poverty in Gloucestershire. Gloucestershire County Council,
1998.
Suggested Terms of Reference for a Community Reference Group
Much anti-poverty and social exclusion work is undertaken by the voluntary and community sectors and informal self-help groups. This work makes a contribution to the developing Health Improvement Programme, but is not always part of a coherent strategy. Part of the HImP's process is to consult with the public about what is necessary to improve health. There are practical difficulties for the statutory authorities in communicating with the communities they serve. This is acknowledged in the 1999 Director of Public Health's Report under the twin headings of "self esteem and empowerment" and "community involvement". Following a discussion on the review of the Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance (GAPA), which was carried out by external consultants, it was agreed that a Community Reference Group was necessary to "bridge the gap".
Purpose:
The Community Reference Group (CRG) will ensure that the community and voluntary sectors and local communities are actively involved throughout the development, implementation and evaluation of HImP work in the City Of Gloucester.
Specifically the Community Reference Group will:
CRG Community Reference Group
DETR Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions
GAPA Gloucester Anti-Poverty Alliance
GESDU Gloucester Economic and Social Development Unit
HImP Health Improvement Programme
JCC Joint Consultative Committee
LPT Locality Planning Team
LSP Local Strategic Partnership
PCG Primary Care Group