The proceedings are
reported in the language in which they were spoken in the
committee. In addition, a transcription of the simultaneous
interpretation is included. Where contributors have supplied
corrections to their evidence, these are noted in the
transcript.
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Dechreuodd y cyfarfod am 09:16.
The meeting began at 09:16.
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Cyflwyniad,
Ymddiheuriadau, Dirprwyon a Datgan Buddiannau
Introduction, Apologies, Substitutions and Declarations of
Interest
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[1]
John Griffiths: May I welcome everyone to this meeting of
the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee? The first
item on our agenda today, item 1, is introductions, apologies,
substitutions and declarations of interest. We’ve received
apologies from Gareth Bennett, Rhianon Passmore and Janet Finch-Saunders. Are there any declarations of
interest? No.
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09:17
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Ymchwiliad i Dlodi yng Nghymru:
Dulliau yn Seiliedig ar Asedau i Leihau Tlodi—Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 1
Inquiry into Poverty in Wales:
Asset-based Approaches to Poverty Reduction—Evidence Session
1
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[2]
John Griffiths: We’ll move straight in, then, to item
2 on our agenda today, which is our one-day inquiry into poverty in
Wales in terms of asset-based approaches to poverty reduction. For
our first evidence session today, we welcome Victoria Goodban, UK
programme manager for Wales for Oxfam Cymru; Anna McVicker,
livelihoods worker for the South Riverside Community Development
Centre; and Jane Lewis, cluster manager for Communities First
Newport West Cluster, regeneration, investment and housing, Newport
City Council. So, thank you very much for coming along this
morning. I would invite you, then, to make an opening statement of
five to 10 minutes, just setting out your experience and approach
to these matters.
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[3]
Ms Goodban: Good morning. Hi, everyone. So, from an Oxfam
perspective, asset-based approaches are something that we’ve
had a long-running interest in, and, in terms of what we would call
the sustainable livelihoods approach, this is something that has
grown from our work in international development. So, from the late
1980s and 1990s, a lot of work has gone on to focus on how we can
build upon the assets and capabilities of people to provide
sustainable and lasting solutions for issues affecting their
livelihoods so that we can build on the strengths that are there,
and effectively build resilience both in individuals and in
communities so that there’s a kind of holistic view of the
livelihoods of individuals, but also communities, and different
things impacting on that. So, yes, basically, it’s taking the
approach of looking at what people have, rather than what they
don’t have. So, traditional deficits models, which often look
at the gaps, whether that’s the lack of a job or mental
health issue, or whatever it might be, and instead, looking at the
capabilities and assets at people’s disposal. So, that
approach, giving attention to people’s agency in that
situation, whilst not ignoring, as well, some of the structural
deficits and barriers that exist. So, it’s an opportunity to
really look, at an individual level, at the holistic experience of
people in terms of their personal situation, but also then to link
that with the macro level in terms of services or structural
economic issues and things so that it can influence the way that
policy is made.
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[4]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thank you very much, Victoria. And,
Anna.
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[5]
Ms McVicker: My experience of the approach is, obviously, working
using it directly, so I’m employed in South Riverside
Community Development Centre, down the road, and was part of a
three-year Oxfam and south Riverside partnership programme, working
using this approach with local people. So, my experience comes from
using it in the local area with people, and the focus was on
supporting people to make progress towards having a more
sustainable livelihood. So, it wasn’t necessarily about
getting people into employment, although that was obviously an aim
and many did actually gain employment, but it was about working
with people who are maybe quite far away from services, quite far
away from statutory support and maybe quite far away from the job
market for various reasons, and working with them in a holistic
way. So, looking at what was going on in their life around their
housing, around their health, around their childcare issues, and
this approach really recognises that all of those things impact
together and affect and influence how somebody can then move
forward. I think it was a great way of working with people. We
worked with lots of different people in the area, we had lots of
great outcomes. As I said, they were not all employment outcomes,
but people making steps towards training, education and moving
closer to the job market. So, that’s my experience of using
it.
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[6]
John Griffiths:
Thank you very much, Anna. And,
Jane.
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[7]
Ms Lewis: Again, like Anna, I worked originally for Duffryn
Community Link, who were a pilot with Oxfam—one of the nine
communities across Wales that piloted this approach—and it
was really successful. As a consequence of that, as the Big Lottery
Funding was coming to an end, we saw the benefit of that within the
Communities First programme and we took that on and have since
replicated that approach across Newport within the Communities
First clusters. So, for us, again, we’ve really seen the
value of that because it is a person-centred
approach—we’re dealing with the whole person, or the
whole family even. So, you’re looking at what a person
actually has as a starting point and then building from there to
try and progress them in whatever way that might be. For us, we
were a little bit constrained because we were operating within the
Communities First outcomes framework, so we were looking at what
outcomes we could achieve with that, but it goes much wider than
that for us.
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[8]
So, as Anna said, ultimately people have
gone into work, but we’ve seen so much greater improvement
and access to other services. So, for me, I think it’s very
much been bridging the gap between the community and accessing
statutory services where people are most marginalised and
don’t engage with other services. So, a lot of the work
we’ve done has been around schools engaging families to get
their children into education, because that has been a priority for
us, and building the gap then so that we’re getting children
into school, we’re getting families to access Families First
provision and to access social services as well, whereas in the
past they’ve just seen them as, ‘They’re going to
take my children away. We don’t want anything to do with
them.’ It’s through that hand-holding approach—.
So, it is an intensive approach; it can be both: it can be
intensive and non-intensive. It’s whatever the needs that
individual or family require, really. And the great thing about
this approach is that it’s flexible, so we’re not time
bound like some services are. We can be there as long as the person
needs, or for just a short, sharp intervention, if you like, to
help people just to get them on their way. So, it has that
flexibility to be person centred and, to my mind, has worked
really, really well.
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[9]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thank you very much, Jane, and
thank you all for those brief introductory remarks. Okay, Jenny
Rathbone has some questions for you.
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[10]
Jenny Rathbone:
Thank you. Good morning. I can see that
this sustainable livelihoods approach works well in developing
countries where the state is almost absent, or very weak, and not
even supplying the basic services that we take for granted in this
country. So, I wondered how much this is a reflection on the
shrinking of the state in this country—across the
UK—that we can no longer rely on public services, and,
therefore, we’re having to get people to do it for
themselves.
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[11]
Ms Goodban: From an Oxfam perspective, again, I would say
that our role in this sort of work is certainly to be about
evidencing the impact of working in a certain way with people, and
then, the idea being that statutory services take that on and see
the benefit of it and the impact. I think, obviously, we have
austerity and all the rest of it, which means there is a reduction
in the other services that people can turn to. But, equally, just
the way that those services have been administered up until now,
arguably, hasn’t been in this person-centred way and
hasn’t, therefore, had the impact that it maybe could have
had. So, that would be our kind of takeaway, I think, from the
experience of, particularly in the last four years, the substantial
livelihoods project that we co-ordinated across nine areas in
Wales. That was about looking at working with a range of different
demographics in different locations, from Caernarfon to Duffryn to
south Riverside.
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[12]
We found the impact of working in this way with people was
consistently effective, irrespective of their background or the
situations they were facing, from asylum seekers to families with
children in the nurture class, for instance, in Duffryn, or people
with severe mental and physical ill-health problems up in the
Wrexham area—a real range. I think, across the board, as
well, obviously, services are limited in what they can offer
people, and it often can be a little siloed as well. So, you go to
your GP for your physical ill-health or maybe getting mental health
stuff, but what the livelihoods workers could do was to think
across the piece and think about the different services that
actually could be supporting that person when that person was often
not in a position to represent themselves or to self-represent to
those services. Because there was no competition, in any
way—it’s all about that working across different
sectors and different organisations to really make the links.
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[13]
Maybe Jane could say a bit more about that, because I know, in
Duffryn, that was a key thing. When you’ve got individuals
who are already attached to a number of different services,
it’s hard to bring them all together and to actually get the
outcomes that you need for people when they’re particularly
complex.
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[14]
Jenny Rathbone: So, that’s having a more integrated
approach to problem solving. I was taken by what you said, Jane,
that you were basically working with people who weren’t
accessing public services, either because they thought it
wasn’t going to be a happy outcome if they did, or because
they were so far away from either realising themselves or being
able to navigate their way through those services. So, I can see
that—it’s not dissimilar to countries where services
are absolutely absent—some individuals don’t know how
to navigate their way through services.
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[15]
Ms Lewis: For us, that has been a key outcome—getting
people to engage with other services. So, we’ve had to build
a stronger relationship and get other services to understand what
we’re trying to achieve as well, because, very often, it has
been, ‘Well, you’re treading on our toes. Why are you
trying to do that? We’re here to do that.’ But the fact
is that people won’t engage with those services.
They’re not going to go knocking on their doors and ask for
help. So, we’ve sort of bridged the gap.
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[16]
As I said, we work very closely through the schools within the west
of Newport, specifically, and so they would come to us. We had the
relationship, and we built up a process so that they would come to
us and say, ‘We’ve got these children, these families,
who we know need help, but they won’t answer the door to
anybody else.’ But the approach that we took, by looking at
the whole family, was that we were just a friendly face going to
knock the door. We didn’t go in flashing badges and saying,
‘Oh, we’re here from—you know, we’re
representing this service or that service,’ but,
‘We’re here to help.’ And then, it was unpicking
their—we call it ‘unpicking their backpack’,
really, just to find out what it is that they need. What have they
got so far and what do they actually need? What services can we try
and link them in with to give them the support that they need to
move on? That has resulted, for us, in people accessing school
services, accessing the social services, and we’ve built that
relationship with other agencies as well.
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[17]
They’re all suffering from austerity as well, and, in some
areas, their services are being cut and they’re really
stretched, particularly social services. So, we do feel as though
we are sometimes filling the gap there as well, in helping people within the community
to access services, but we’re
holding their hand until they can do that, until there is—.
Social services and Families First have got case loads that they
work to, and so we are there, holding their hands, until a spot
becomes available for them to access those services as well. So,
we’re keeping people afloat in the communities very much as
well.
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09:30
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[18]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, how would you say this service
differs from the traditional model of the temple, the mosque and
the church to provide a helping hand to their
communities?
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[19]
Ms Lewis: I guess we’re there in the community, so
it’s developing that level of trust. So, I suppose, in some
ways, it is similar. It’s a face or an organisation that
people actually trust and will go to for help, because it’s
seen as non-threatening. You can go there and, yes, we are very
clear that, if there is a need, we will refer to social services,
but we’ll do that holding your hand. So, we’re not just
going to say, ‘Oh, there’s an issue here. We need to
refer you on to social services, and there you go.’ It will
be, ‘We’re going to do this. We need to do this for
this reason. We want to take you with us and we’ll go with
you to help you and support you through that process as well, and
hopefully come out the other end.’ So, in some ways, I
suppose it is similar to that and it’s also about what we
have done throughout the Oxfam project, which was train local
people to become peer mentors so that they then self-refer as well.
So, they also are a recognised person within their community that
other people will go to and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got an
issue. Where do I go for help?’ So we’ve left that
behind as well, to a certain degree, to enable people to know where
to signpost to, and other people recognise that they are a point of
contact within the community for help.
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[20]
Jenny Rathbone: Okay. How
would you say this differs from what’s labelled a
‘place-based approach’ to tackling poverty, which some
people argue was the approach taken by Communities First?
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[21]
Ms McVicker: I think there’s certainly something about
working with an individual or a family and spending that time and
getting to know that person, and building up that relationship.
There’s no doubt about that, and I think some of the outcomes
from the three-year project showed that the most change happened
and the most progress happened where people had intensive support,
meaning that hand-holding stuff, that time spent with them, that
ability to do things that maybe other services didn’t.
Certainly in Riverside, differently to Newport, I found myself
working with lots of people who wouldn’t have maybe met the
criteria for statutory services, so, lots of people with quite
debilitating mental health problems, but they’re not going to
receive support from a community mental health team because the
eligibility isn’t right for that service. They were still
struggling and that was having a massive effect on their ability to
move on in their life. Similarly with housing, I had people with
lots of housing and obviously they were accessing statutory
services, but they needed something else a bit more—somebody
who could do a bit of everything. I think the difference is that
most services deliver against one—you know, it’s either
employment, or you go here for your mental health and here for your
housing. We were able to say, not that we would do all of
that—we would obviously signpost, as you said—but we
wouldn’t ignore that part. We wouldn’t say, ‘Oh,
we don’t do that.’
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[22]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, there’s not that much
difference, then, between what’s called a place-based
approach and sustainable livelihoods.
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[23]
Ms Goodban: There’s no tension between the two. I think the
issue is that, obviously, with Communities First, you have that
postcode lottery sometimes. You have someone on one side of the
street who is eligible and someone on the other who isn’t.
That’s something that, luckily, with the funding we had, we
didn’t have any of those issues, because it could be open. I
think that’s something that we would advocate for that, as
much as possible, services are open to people who need them, and
that the support is open-ended as well, so that it can meet the
needs of people when the crises happen, or when the ebbs and flows
of life’s shocks hit.
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[24]
Jenny Rathbone:
Obviously that poses lots of questions
about sustainability, but I’ll pass on to my colleague Joyce
on that one.
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[25]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Joyce Watson.
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[26]
Joyce Watson: I want to look at the practical application.
You’ve given us some insight already into the practical
application. I suppose the starting question for me is: you said
time and time again that you were dealing with people that were far
removed from any type of service whatsoever, so the obvious
question in my mind is, how did you know who they were if they were
so far removed?
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[27]
Ms McVicker: I think for my part, working in South Riverside
Community Development Centre, I think the key thing is that when
Oxfam are working with partners, they’re working with
partners who are part of that community. We’ve been there for
a long time. I didn’t take referrals in any traditional
sense, I got to know people through using the centre. So, they were
women who might be coming to the English classes there; they were
local people using the centre in other ways; there were lots of
word of mouth-type referrals. I did have some referrals from
statutory services, but the majority of them came through being in
the community, working in the community and knowing people.
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[28]
Quite often, it would start with somebody wanting some specific
support with something—it might be a phone call, it might be
a letter or it might be a—and then there would be a sort of
opening up of other stuff that was going for that person,
‘Oh, you can help me with that. Okay, I didn’t know.
There’s nobody else who could do that with me.’ So,
that’s how it worked in Riverside. It’s quite
different, maybe, in Newport, is it?
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[29]
Ms Lewis: Yes, in Newport—Duffryn
specifically—we worked with the nurture class in the infant
school. So, these were children with social, emotional, behavioural
issues. We engaged with the parents there very much through the
school. I guess it goes back to the adverse childhood experiences
that are being talked about at the moment. So, it was about
engaging those parents, and if they weren’t engaging with the
school, the children had to go to school, or if they weren’t
engaging with the school, then it was about going to knock on their
doors. We had that flexibility. It wasn’t just sitting in an
office and waiting for people to come to us, it was actually
proactively going out, knocking doors and saying, ‘This is
who we are. Your children aren’t in school. Can we help in
any way? Is there something going on?’ Or, if the children
had been in school, perhaps we were having coffee mornings or
activity days within the school to engage parents in a very
informal way, so it was just saying, ‘Come in, see
what’s going on.’ It would be on the school yard, as
they were dropping their children off at school in the morning. It
would be making that connection with those parents and then
building the rapport from there.
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[30]
That grew, so we were having a weekly group every Monday morning
for a while, for example, so that, after a busy weekend, parents
could come in, drop their children at school and let off steam,
‘This is what’s happened on the weekend.’ It
would just again be full-on. From there, we were able to work with
them and build that trust. We ran courses, they went through
training—anything, really, that was required, whether that be
taking them to a family court or handholding them to the GP for a
mental health referral. It could have been anything. It was just
working with those parents to access services, initially to make
sure that the children were accessing their education and that
their welfare was being catered for, but then looking at the family
as a bigger picture and working with the whole family to identify
what was going on and where we could then help them progress as
well.
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[31]
So, for us, the ‘in’ has been through the schools, and
the schools have bought into it in Newport big time
now—across the whole of Newport. I think we’ve done
that through Communities First. With the changes now in Communities
First, the schools are crying out to us and saying, because
we’re withdrawing and we’re not working necessarily in
schools with anybody under the age of 16 going forward,
‘What’s going to happen now? Where do we go? Who can we
support?’ So, we’re trying to put measures in place
through the transitional period now, in the phasing out of
Communities First, to enable that to go on. But, in the longer
term, I think that’s a critical point that needs to be
addressed.
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[32]
Joyce Watson: Okay. You’ve given us a number of
practical results using the approach. Anna, you talked about a
legacy, about building peer groups. I think it was you.
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[33]
Ms McVicker: Jane mentioned it, but yes.
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[34]
Joyce Watson: It was Jane. Yet, you’ve just said now
that they’re concerned about that perhaps not going forward
in your school setting, as an example. So, I suppose the question
has to be: if that’s not the case, why isn’t it the
case? Why hasn’t that worked?
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[35]
Ms Lewis: I think because there’s a lot more work to
be done. We’ve got so many people who are out there who
perhaps aren’t even accessing support at the moment. I think,
through the original programme with Oxfam, we allowed for peer
support and peer mentoring training. Going forward, that
hasn’t been such a strong element, certainly not within our
remit, because we’ve been focusing on trying to access people
to be able to help them to move forward. Not everybody is going to
be ready to take on that role, so you’ve got to have the
individuals who are ready and willing to be able to take on that
role, I think, as well.
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[36]
Ms Goodban: But I’d say—. Sorry, just to add:
it’s the resource behind that, to enable that to happen,
because obviously, as Communities First, you’ve got a certain
set of objectives you’re working to, and with the funded
projects, the peer mentors were a key element of that, about the
sustainability of the work, but it was very localised to the nine
areas we were working in, because that was where the resource was.
I think it can’t be underestimated as well, the time and the
investment that that requires. It’s not just training people
and then leaving them to do things. It’s then about mentoring
them in their peer support roles, so that you’re not just
leaving people to do the job of the state, in effect, often, or
potentially falling into that gap of being the link with services,
which arguably isn’t necessarily what they should be doing,
but we want to make sure, as much as possible, that people do feel
empowered and understand their rights and where they can then
support other people to access those services.
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[37]
Ms Lewis: We’ve actually seen that the people that we
trained with the Oxfam project as peer mentors are actually pretty
much all now in work. They’ve moved on that step, so
they’re in work and are engaged in other activities. So,
they’ve moved on again, and perhaps aren’t as
accessible now to the community as they once were.
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[38]
Joyce Watson: So, the success in one area leaves exposure in
another area, I suppose.
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[39]
Ms Lewis: Yes, that needs to be continued.
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[40]
Joyce Watson: So, obviously we’re talking about poverty
reduction here. That’s really what our inquiry is all about.
Have you got examples where this approach, the asset-based
approach, has really affected positively the state of poverty that
people were in at the start and at the end?
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[41]
Ms Lewis: Yes, I think. We’ve got lots of practical
examples of where that’s happened. People have accessed
various services; they’ve been able to access food banks;
they’ve been able to access benefits advice and advice for
lots of other different services as well, be they mental health,
financial support, and ultimately into employment as well. So,
we’ve got lots of examples and I think that was recorded
through the evaluation of the lottery-funded project as well,
wasn’t it, on the social return?
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[42]
Ms McVicker: Quite often, I think, when people got into employment
in Riverside, it was about the quality of that employment, and
the—. I worked with quite a few people who had been in
employment, and they’d had jobs on and off, but nothing
sustainable, if you like, or things hadn’t lasted, and that
was what we were able to explore, and giving people the time and
the support to move towards something that they wanted to do and
that they had skills for, and developing those. I guess, in the
long term, that’s more sustainable. People end up in jobs
where they’re satisfied and there’s
progression—decent work, isn’t it, I guess?
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[43]
John Griffiths:
Okay, Joyce. I think we maybe need to
move on, at this stage, to some further questions from Sian
Gwenllian.
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[44]
Sian Gwenllian: Nid ydw i’n dal ddim
cweit yn deall y gwahaniaeth rhwng y dull rydych chi’n
sôn amdano fo a’r dulliau eraill sydd yn cael eu
defnyddio o fewn Cymunedau yn Gyntaf ac o fewn Teuluoedd yn Gyntaf.
Yn fy ardal i, mae yna broject, Gyda’n Gilydd, sydd yn
broject Teuluoedd yn Gyntaf, sydd yn gweithio’n debyg iawn i
beth rydych chi’n ei ddweud—hynny yw, nid yw o’n
wasanaeth statudol; mae o’n wasanaeth lle mae pobl yn
cyfeirio pobl ymlaen, efallai, ond yn gweithio efo’r teulu yn
y canol. Beth yw’r gwahaniaeth, felly, rhwng y dull
yma—yr asset based—a’r dulliau rheini,
a’r dulliau, yn wir, mae llawer o weithwyr Cymunedau yn
Gyntaf yn eu defnyddio? Hynny yw, maen nhw’n gweithio efo
teuluoedd yn y ffordd rydych chi yn sôn, felly beth yw’r
gwahaniaeth sylfaenol?
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Sian Gwenllian: I still don’t quite understand the difference
between the method you’re talking about and the other methods
that are used within Communities First and Families First. In my
area, there is a project called Gyda’n Gilydd,
‘Together’, which is a Families First project that
works in a very similar way to what you’re talking
about—that is, it’s not a statutory service; it’s
a service where people refer people on, maybe, but they work with
the family at the centre of it. What’s the difference between
this particular method—the asset-based approach—and the
other approaches, and, indeed, those approaches that many
Communities First workers use? That is, they work with families,
don’t they, in the way that you’re talking about, so
what’s the difference there?
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09:45
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[45]
Ms Goodban: I think that the only
difference—. I don’t
know that there is a difference. I think, in some areas, a
number of the partners that we’ve worked with were, or
happened to be, Communities First areas too. So, South Riverside
Community Development Centre is the cluster manager for BRG in
Cardiff—Butetown, Riverside and Grangetown. Up in Sylfaen,
Sylfaen were working in the Peblig ward and, again, they were
working very closely with the Communities First team and Families
First and all the rest of it. So, I think there are elements,
certainly in the way that particularly Families First has been
devised and is working, that are very much person centred,
holistic, looking at the whole family, the whole life course and
trying to effectively link people to the services that they need
and are most adequate. I think it’s just that practice varies
quite considerably. So, you’ll find pockets of it that are
really, really strong, just like with any service, I guess.
I’m not in a position to make a judgment about that because I
don’t know about how Communities First or Families First have
been run across the whole of Wales, personally, but I do know that
there are some really great examples of where asset-based
approaches have been really integrated into where they’ve
worked. So, Glyncoch was another area where we were partnering
with—it was Glyncoch Community Regeneration. They very much
used this asset-based approach in the way they work with people at
community level as well, around organising support for people and
engaging with other services.
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|
[46]
So, I think there are elements of it that kind of bleed into the
way that other things have been working, but it’s just about
having a more—. I think, from an Oxfam perspective,
we’d really like to see it much more a kind of—. You
know, there’s a real intention there, across the board, that
this is something that all services try to take on. So, working in
this way with people, that it’s not just left to some pockets
of good practice here and there, but that there’s that
leadership from the top, I suppose, about giving workers and
services often the freedom to work in this more specific and
tailored way so that you can really meet the needs of people who
often have very complex lives and issues and challenges, which
might be precluding their progress in other ways.
|
|
[47]
Ms Lewis: Certainly from my experience in Newport, we do
work really closely with Families First and social services. So, we
attend weekly allocations meetings with the Families First teams to
work out who is best placed to work with the families, because,
again, we have limited numbers of staff, as do they, and yet there
are more people out there than probably we can all cope with as
well in terms of referrals that we’re getting in. So,
it’s looking at who is best placed, and very often we will
support them together. My experience is that Families First tends
to be more time bound, so that they will put in an intervention for
a specific period, and we will go beyond that so we can support
people for however long they need to have that support. That may be
that they—. With Families First, my understanding is they
will only be able to work with people who aren’t engaging
with social services, where we will carry on. So, if they are
referred to Families First and are supported by the Families First
team but then need to go and be referred on to social services, we
will continue that support. So, there is that consistency and that
person—. We’re not just passing them on to another
agency. There is somebody there who is consistent throughout that
process as well. I think what Vicky was saying is absolutely right;
we need to be looking at a holistic approach across everybody.
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[48]
Sian Gwenllian: Wouldn’t it be better, then, to extend
the remit of Families First teams, which are establishing, and
using best practice from the Families First teams, rather than
having a number of different teams of people doing similar
work?
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|
[49]
Ms Goodban: Potentially, although I guess you’re
excluding people who don’t fall into the bracket of having a
family, for instance. So, we’re often working with
individuals—single people—who, because they don’t
have that dependant or that child in school, they are that bit
harder to access or support and know exactly where they fit, and
depending on age and all the rest of it. I suppose that would be
the only issue with some of the established programmes—that
they’re already targeting a certain demographic, and so it
could then be exclusive.
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|
[50]
Just to add as well, I guess the other thing that was different
with the livelihoods project that we ran was that we were able to
have this livelihoods budget attached to it. That was a
deliberately flexible pot of money, which could be used to address
whatever barrier a participant has to progressing. So, it
wasn’t curtailed to just childcare or training, like a lot of
general services might be, but it was really for anything, from a
DNA test for somebody who didn’t know if a child was theirs,
to some work boots for somebody who could then get a job on a
building site—so, a real range. But we found that
that’s really critical, actually, because often it’s
not very much money, but it’s the flexibility of it that
enables people to really move on and to get over that hurdle that
is actually stopping their progress at that point.
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|
[51]
Ms Lewis: I think, as well, now that the livelihoods
approach is contained within the Communities First programme within
Newport City Council, we have less flexibility, because we have to
go through the council’s procurement process for anything
that we want to spend. Whereas with the pilot programmes, because
they were through community-based organisations in the main, there
was more flexibility, so you could be more reactive in terms of if
somebody needed something. We had one family come in and the
children weren’t accessing school because they were
absolutely filled with head lice. So, we were able to just
literally get some petty cash, go to the chemist, buy the stuff and
treat them that day. I can’t do that now—
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[52]
Jenny Rathbone:
What stuff?
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|
[53]
Ms Lewis: The head lice treatment to treat the
children.
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[54]
Jenny Rathbone:
No, I appreciate that—
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|
[55]
Ms Lewis: Sorry—
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|
[56]
Jenny Rathbone:
But there’s a huge amount of
controversy about that. Maybe
we’ll—[Inaudible.]
|
|
[57]
Ms Lewis: Okay, yes, but it was in order to get the children
into school. That was stopping the children going to school. So, it
was just a quick example of how we could access some funding
quickly to be able to get those children back into school, and then
work with the parents very quickly.
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[58]
Sian Gwenllian:
What would be the disadvantages that
you’ve seen from the assets-based approach? You’ve
talked a lot about how good it is, but what were the
disadvantages?
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|
[59]
Ms Goodban: I guess from the position of procuring services and
all the rest of it, maybe it’s the open-endedness of the
support, and also the individualised nature of it. Because that
makes it unpredictable, and so it makes it difficult to plan for,
sometimes. But, arguably, we would say that, actually, we created
value through this project. So, for every £1 we spent, we were
able to demonstrate a social return on investment of £4.43, I
think it was. So, that’s a mixture of fiscal, economic and
social value. So, it’s about looking at the wider impacts,
not just about saving money right here, right now, but the longer
term over-the-life-course stuff. Because if those children
aren’t then in school for a number of weeks or months or
whatever it might be, how’s that then going to impact on
their ability to succeed later on? So, it’s kind of looking
at the longer-term impacts of things and thinking of it as a more
preventative measure, really.
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|
[60]
Ms McVicker: Yes, and, quite often, people knowing that they can
come back to you at any point in the future. I mean, this was a
three-year programme we ran, which felt like a long time. I was
meeting people at the start and thinking that, in theory, I could
still be working with them in three years’ time. But, it
didn’t often happen like that. People did move on and
progress, and often I felt that it was just them knowing that they
could come back. I mean, people might come back with small issues
and things they wanted a bit of support with, but it was rare to
work intensively for that amount of time with somebody. Often,
people did move on of their own accord and became more
self-sufficient, obviously.
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|
[61]
Ms Goodban: Often, as well, the sort of people that were
accessing the support were people who effectively are costing the
state quite a bit of money, whether that’s through probation,
or through social services, or through going to the GP on a regular
basis because they, you know—. So, there’s no quick,
cheap fix for these issues, but we feel that if you can frontload
that and say, actually, if you can really get to the bottom of what
the issue is for somebody, then you can effectively then change
their life course, and you can really build that resilience in.
Whereas if we’re constantly kind of reacting, and at crisis
point and sticking plasters, then it’s really doing them a
disservice and not really helping the long-term alleviation of
poverty, particularly in certain communities.
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[62]
John Griffiths:
If I could just come in at this stage,
Sian. You said, I think, Victoria, that it might be
advisable and it might be fruitful to extend this approach across
Wales, perhaps in a more systematic way. Obviously, Welsh
Government has leadership responsibilities, local government has
leadership responsibilities, their individual services, the health
boards and others—are you looking to those sorts of players,
as it were, to take that leadership role, to look at the experience
of an asset-based approach and evaluate whether it perhaps might be
used more systematically across Wales? Is that what you would have
in mind or—?
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|
[63]
Ms Goodban: Yes, I think that would be an ambition, and I
think, with the advent of the well-being of future generations Act
and that kind of more holistic sense of how do we bring everybody
in society up and provide a kind of secure social floor for
everybody in Welsh society, the onus now is heavily on local
authorities and things to think about how they’re going to do
that. So, there’s a real opportunity there, I guess, for the
public service boards to lead on some of that stuff,
potentially.
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|
[64]
John Griffiths: Are you aware of any of the public service
boards showing an interest in asset-based approaches in taking work
forward, or not?
|
|
[65]
Ms Goodban: Not personally. I don’t know, Jane, if
you’ve had any—.
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|
[66]
Ms Lewis: No. Through the Communities First programme,
we’ve been trying to push this approach through across
Newport, and we’re getting there with that. I wouldn’t
say we’re wholly there yet. We’ve got more training to
do with staff on the ground, and, obviously, with the changes that
have been going on, as well, that has been difficult. But I think
that’s something that we need to look at. The next step is:
how does that transpire then into this new well-being of future
generations—and through the public service boards?
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[67]
John Griffiths: Jenny.
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[68]
Jenny Rathbone: In the context of the well-being of future
generations Act, which we all have to be working with, how much do
you think your approach and your methodology have changed the way
that public services operate in the way you’ve rubbed up
against them? Because, obviously, you mentioned that you meet with
Families First. So, have public services changed either their
attitude or their approach in any way? Is there anything that you
can pinpoint?
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|
[69]
Ms Lewis: I think some have, certainly, and I’ve been
working closely in the local area with GP surgeries, because we
were looking at social prescribing as another way forward and using
the livelihoods approach again for those patients who, perhaps, GPs
feel they can’t give enough time to. They can deal with their
medical, clinical conditions, but there’s something else they
need—they’re referring directly to us. So, going back
to your question earlier, that’s another source of referral,
really, for people, and the people who we see through GP surgeries
are people who we wouldn’t normally engage with, but, because
they’ve gone to their GP for an issue, they’re then
referring them on to us, as well. Now, that’s just in its
infancy, and it’s something that we’re exploring more,
again, with the well-being of future generations and how we could
then potentially roll that out across Newport, as well. So,
that’s something that we’d like to explore in more
detail, and I think that that’s something that GPs do—.
Certainly, I think the health Minister came down to the local
surgery in January, and was quite keen to hear about that, as well.
But the livelihoods approach is core to that whole ethos,
anyway.
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|
[70]
Jenny Rathbone: Okay, because I think—just turning to
Victoria—in the evaluation that was done by an independent
organisation, one of their recommendations is that you’ve got
to strive to continue getting funding because, without it,
vulnerable people are left without support. So, that would rather
indicate that public services haven’t changed, because if the
rug is withdrawn from the way in which you’re working, are we
back to square one, or has there been an impact?
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[71]
Ms Goodban: We would hope not. So, to update on another area
that has developed out of it, part of the evaluation of
participants was around their experiences of public services. So,
that was assessing how they experience things like social services,
health or the jobcentre, over the course of the project. A number
of issues had arisen around jobcentres and the way that they felt
they were treated by the Department for Work and Pensions. That
gave us the opportunity, then, to go to the DWP and to say,
‘Okay, we’re seeing some issues on the ground. Would
you be interested in hearing a bit more
about this?’ Actually,
we’ve had a really open door and that’s resulted in a
kind of 18-month training project, which we’re co-delivering
with partners—Anna and Jane. So, we’re using some of
the case studies and some of the examples from this work to train
front-line and managerial staff in DWP across Wales in
understanding some of these structural causes of poverty and how
that impacts on people over their life course, and then also
introducing them to this sustainable livelihoods approach toolkit,
and the tools, to see if they’re useful for them in the way
that they’re working with benefit claimants. We’ve had
the University of Salford do an independent evaluation of that, so
we’ve had an interim report, which is showing really positive
signs around staff finding it has helped them to offer more
effective customer support and helped to feel more satisfied with
their work as well, so, to feel like they’re actually having
more of an impact on the people that they’re seeing. So,
it’s not just a quick dash—‘Have you done your 10
applications this week?’ I’m not saying that’s
what every Jobcentre Plus work coach will do at all, but it’s
about giving them some practical tools as well to use with people,
and they’re really seeing the benefits of that. So, that is a
way that we are trying to impact on a wider—
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10:00
|
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[72]
John Griffiths: I’m
afraid we haven’t really got time for much else, Jenny,
unless it’s a very short, sharp point.
|
|
[73]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, can you envisage statutory services
actually commissioning work off you to continue this sort of
work?
|
|
[74]
Ms Goodban: We’re not interested in, I think, becoming a
kind of—
|
|
[75]
Jenny Rathbone:
Well, I don’t mean you, but
organisations on the ground. Because prudent healthcare demands
that we do what we’re qualified to do and no more. So, if the
health centre thinks it’s helpful to refer people to you, can
you envisage the time where they will say, ‘Well, we’ll
give part of our budget to enable you to do that’?
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|
[76]
Ms Lewis: To be honest, the local health centre that I’ve
been working with have already said, ‘We’d like to buy
in a service’. So, that is something that we are going to be
exploring, but that’s only on a very small scale at the
moment, obviously, because they’ve got to put in—it
will be a pilot with them, just to see how it goes, but, obviously,
within their cluster there are another six GP surgeries as well,
potentially 40,000 patients, so it could grow. But it’s just
building that up.
|
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[77]
Jenny Rathbone:
And in Riverside? Any sign of
that?
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|
[78]
Ms McVicker: I think we worked with—. Like I said earlier,
we worked with people maybe who weren’t accessing—. A
lot of people access their GPs. We didn’t go down that route,
but we worked with a lot of people who weren’t fitting into
other statutory services anyway, so we probably had less impact
with statutory services. We engaged quite closely with local
community organisations in Riverside.
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[79]
Jenny Rathbone: Okay.
|
|
[80]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Thank you all very much for coming
along and giving evidence today. You will be sent a transcript to
check for factual accuracy. Thanks very much indeed.
|
|
[81]
Ms Goodban: Thank you.
|
|
[82]
Ms Lewis: Thanks a lot.
|
|
[83]
John Griffiths:
We’re having a very short
two-minute break to establish our video link with the next witness.
Okay. Two minutes.
|
|
Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 10:03 a 10:07.
The meeting adjourned between 10:03 and 10:07.
|
|
Ymchwiliad i Dlodi yng Nghymru:
Dulliau yn Seiliedig ar Asedau i Leihau Tlodi—Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 2
Inquiry into Poverty in Wales:
Asset-based Approaches to Poverty Reduction—Evidence Session
2
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|
[84]
John Griffiths:
Okay, welcome, everybody, back for our
second evidence session today looking at our inquiry into poverty
in Wales and asset-based approaches. May I welcome Andy Milne,
chief executive of SURF, Scotland’s regeneration network?
Welcome to committee this morning, Andy, and I wonder if I might
ask you—
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|
[85]
Mr Milne: Good morning.
|
|
[86]
John Griffiths:
Thank you. And I wonder if I might ask
you to make a short opening statement setting out the approach
that’s been used in Scotland.
|
|
[87]
Mr Milne: Thank you for this opportunity. It’s always
really useful to discuss poverty and regeneration challenges across
different parts of the UK. For those of you who don’t know,
SURF is Scotland’s regeneration forum. We’re an
independent organisation. We’ve got about 280 members across
all the different sectors involved in the regeneration of Scotland.
Our work is focused on, firstly, networking across those sectors so
that people understand more about what each other is doing, and can
co-operate better together. And then, on top of that, we can begin
to learn what’s working well—what kind of connections
and collaborations are working well—and then our task is to
try and influence national policy and practice.
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[88]
We work very closely with the Scottish
Government and with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities in
Scotland, but it’s worth pointing out, I think, that
we’re independent of them—we’re not a part of the
Government. Our money comes from our membership fees, from the
events that we run, and also from contracts that we run with
various partners, including the Scottish Government and
others.
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|
[89]
So, in Scotland, as with the rest of the
UK, there are substantial challenges of poverty and increasing
challenges around inequalities, and it’s those inequalities
that we’re mostly concerned with in terms of the
disconnection of communities—as individuals, neighbourhoods,
places, towns—from where the market centres are already
operating relatively well in what is, after all, still a very rich
country in the UK. Scotland and Wales are part of the UK, the sixth
or the eighth richest country on the planet, depending on whether
you believe the International Monetary Fund or the World
Bank.
|
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[90]
Post the crash in 2008, the Scottish
Government could see that there would be problems coming down the
line in terms of economic policy as a result of that banking and
property-led crash. And, in 2011, they produced a regeneration
statement that put a much greater emphasis on community-led
regeneration than had been the case before. Before that point, as
with much of the rest of the UK, we were depending on rising land
and property values to cull off resources in order to make
sporadic investment in regeneration in places that were being left
behind by disconnection, by national policy, local circumstances,
and deteriorations in infrastructure. So, SURF very much agreed
with the wisdom of putting a greater emphasis on community-led
regeneration. Indeed, we feel that that has been underestimated in
terms of a valuable resource for supporting genuine sustainable
regeneration over many decades. We were, however, concerned that
perhaps too much responsibility and expectation was going to be
placed on already disadvantaged communities to somehow regenerate
themselves in the middle of the worst recession anybody had ever
lived through. We still have that concern. The Scottish Government
has followed through on its commitment to supporting community-led
regeneration, as you probably know, through legislation around
right to buy, land legislation, and then followed through with a
community empowerment Bill, now an Act, which brings in
substantially greater powers for communities who take ownership of
assets and resources in their local area to begin to develop them
in a way that will help regenerate the place from within. So, we
are very supportive of that. We’re very involved in promoting
that work, in identifying the market links in that work, so that
people can learn from what’s happening elsewhere.
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[91]
I think what we’re most concerned with is how that locally
based, asset-based,
regeneration—[Inaudible.]—with respect to the
culture of places, the history of places, the civic structure of
places, the knowledge initiatives in those communities, how those
things interact and work at that horizontal, local level, can be
most intelligently and effectively connected to where the big
resources are, where the big decisions are on economic policy, on
public service improvement. So, it’s that connection from the
local to the national that is important. So, for us, asset-based
regeneration in Scotland is a really useful tool for communities to
develop greater cohesion, participation, to develop local
initiatives, social enterprises, development trusts, a whole range
of locally managed organisations. Historical and cultural assets
play a very important part at the start of the process. The process
can grow into quite significant levels of ownership and
participation from communities, and can make quite significant
economic impacts. However—however—our view is that that
will not, and will never be, enough on its own unless it’s
connected into a broader framework of policies that are genuinely
connected, ensuring that opportunities are available for all the
different parts of the community, geographically and
demographically.
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|
[92]
So, that’s the main body of our work, but I’ll just put
on the table that I think there are some very well-meant, but I
think potentially naïve, views about what the possibilities
are for asset-based regeneration in overcoming poverty. As I say, I
think it’s an important tool, but it’s not the whole
answer. The much bigger powers that are affecting international and
national economic frameworks are the ones that are having the
greatest impact on the poorest communities.
|
|
[93]
John Griffiths: Okay, Andy. Well, thanks very much for that
opening statement. I will now invite committee members to ask some
questions, starting with Jenny Rathbone.
|
|
[94]
Jenny Rathbone: Hello. Good morning. I wondered if you could
just—
|
|
[95]
Mr Milne: Morning, Jenny.
|
|
[96]
Jenny Rathbone: —clarify how an asset-based approach
is different to community-led regeneration. Is there some sort of
methodology that your member organisations identify as being
distinct from the general need to rely on communities to help their
own regeneration?
|
|
[97]
Mr Milne: Thank you. I think that community-led regeneration
seems to me to be a broader term, and an aspirational term. I could
not point to many instances in Scotland where there is genuinely
community-led regeneration. I can point to a lot where communities
are involved in discussions around regeneration. I can point to
individual projects that are genuinely community owned, which
operate within a broader framework of efforts to regenerate a place
or a town or village or a city indeed—whatever. Asset-based
regeneration seems to me to be, in most people’s mind, Jenny,
about the ownership of physical assets—it’s about
communities taking over parks, disused buildings and about taking
over service structures in places as well, based on the distinctive
needs and culture and history of that particular place so that
that’s about the community taking ownership of processes.
Whereas community-led regeneration is an aspirational position of
the Scottish Government, and my own view is that we have
communities involved in regeneration. Sometimes we have communities
inspiring regeneration by their particular knowledge and existing
initiatives. But I think there are relatively few examples of
genuinely community-led regeneration.
|
|
10:15
|
|
[98]
Jenny Rathbone:
That’s a useful clarification. So,
how do you think that an asset-based approach differs from the
charitable approach to tackling poverty and misery that’s
been with us for hundreds of years?
|
|
[99]
Mr Milne: Perhaps it would have been useful for me to say
earlier on that I think that asset-based regeneration came
out, as I understand it, of some work in Chicago in the USA
initially, where people were beginning to become fatigued with
being described as basically ‘hopeless cases’ in terms
of communities that are constantly absorbing resources and who are
becoming seen more and more as a drag on the rest of society.
Asset-based regeneration was an effort to say, ‘Well,
actually, there are good things in our communities: there are
social bonds, there are networks. This used to be a steel-making
town and we still have the history of that and we still have some
of the physical legacy of that. There are things here: there are
rivers here and a physical environment here, which we think are
valuable, environmental assets and physical assets that we value
that makes this a good place to be.’
|
|
[100]
That’s a way of turning around the way in which the people in
that particular area look at the situation that they are in and
look again at the possibilities that exist for them to build on
what they have themselves and to make those connections to the
wider framework. It also allows people in those areas to become
more genuine partners in regeneration so that they are seen by
politicians and by decision makers to be bringing something to the
table. So, they are not simply recipients of well-meant largesse,
such as it is, from central points of power. So, they become
that—. I think, as a psychological
shift, that’s quite significant. I think people can then, and
communities can then gather strength and confidence and build
networks and feel a sense of genuine participation in the
decision-making process rather than simply lobbying for more
resources or different kinds of decisions.
|
|
[101]
Jenny Rathbone:
In order to be successful, how essential
is it that other services, public and private, are themselves
changing and responding in a more respectful way to people
who’ve been dealt the bad cards in life?
|
|
[102] Mr Milne: Yes,
and that is my main point here—that unless an effort at
supporting asset-based regeneration, within what are
perceived to be disadvantaged communities, is intelligently
connected into a climate or a structured climate of supportive,
broader policies and supportive broader interaction of other
agencies, then asset-based regeneration, particularly in
disadvantaged communities, will not be successful on its own and
will risk looking like a dumping of liabilities and an abdication
of responsibility. I think, within this debate, Jenny,
there’s a real opportunity to shift the perception of what we
call ‘disadvantaged communities’ and what they actually
are. They are functional parts—even in their
disadvantage—of a larger whole. The larger whole—the
successful parts of our cities and countries—can only exist
because we have these other disadvantaged places; they are part of
the same economic framework. So, if we can shift the thinking to
see them as part of the whole, rather than some kind of unhelpful
appendage that we have to look after and invest in from time to
time, then we get closer towards a whole-system approach that
raises the level of participation, understanding and empathy across
the whole system. If we don’t have that, then we have
accelerating levels of disconnection and inequality, and that
breeds, as we know, misunderstanding, suspicion and antagonism, and
we end up talking about shirkers and skivers, instead of fellow
citizens.
|
|
[103]
John Griffiths:
Thank you very much. Just before we go
on, I think Sian Gwenllian has a question on these points.
Sian.
|
|
[104]
Sian Gwenllian:
Yes, I’m just interested in what
you said at the end there now, really, about the systematic need
for working in a systematic way. I’m interested in the 280
organisations—
|
|
[105]
Mr Milne: Members, yes.
|
|
[106]
Sian Gwenllian:
The members of your group—do they
all use similar methods? Are they all asset-based approaches that
they use? Is there a systematic approach through
Scotland?
|
|
[107]
Mr Milne: No, no there’s not, Sian. That would be
wonderful and we’d be doing great work if that was the case.
Most of my work—and it’s a very small team I have; we
have five members of staff. We’re a relatively small
organisation, but our independence, both politically and
financially, allows us to raise some issues that some of our
members find difficult. As I said, the first piece of our work is
in networking and in raising debate.
|
|
[108]
Not all of our members would agree with
my articulation and my analysis of the situation. But they’re
prepared to be involved in the debate. We have people from the
private sector—various forms of private
sector—involved, and different local authorities. In
Scotland, as I’m sure it is in Wales—through political
leadership, through philosophy, through personalities—we have
different views of what the best way ahead is. I gave up a long
time ago on imagining that we could line all of the ducks up in a
row and we could all move forward at the same time. What I think we
can do is we can point to where things seem to be connecting best,
where the examples seem to be working, and we can foster those
examples and then show, by example, that other people can run their
business more effectively, they can have better returns, they can
have more productive staff, they can have better outcomes, based on
higher levels of co-operation. I think we’re finding some
good evidence for that. But I do respect that other individuals,
other organisations, have different perspectives and they have
different experiences. In the first place, we are interested in
understanding those perspectives and experiences and bringing them
in for further debate.
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[109]
Sian Gwenllian:
Is there much duplication in Scotland
amongst the agencies? Have you got different teams doing similar
work with the same families?
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[110]
Mr Milne: Yes, I think you would find that anywhere,
wouldn’t you? Colleagues from England recently came to
Scotland and said, ‘It’s great for you up
here—you’ve only got five or six million people, and
you can get all the important people you want in one room and you
can all move together.’ But it’s a bit like a family
wedding, isn’t it? You get all your guests together and there
are always those who squabble with each other, and there are always
those who disagree with each other, as well as those who get on
well.
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[111]
We have some examples of duplication, as
we’d expect. We have examples of people protecting their
particular turf, protecting their budgets. We have people who are
antagonistic towards each other. But what we’re trying to do
is to try and open some of that up to try and look at that in a
constructive way and to try and persuade, where we can, that there
are better ways of doing things and that—to keep a focus,
Sian, on what it is we’re all trying to achieve here, and
what are the bottom lines for individual partners and what is it
that we can share in terms of shared outcomes?
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[112]
John Griffiths:
Bethan—a related point?
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[113]
Bethan Jenkins:
Yes, just on this, do you think
that’s why, potentially, some organisations are reluctant to,
perhaps, be a critical friend of Government—because they rely
quite a lot on grants from the Government, and so, if a practice
did need to change approach because of the fact that it
wasn’t working, they would be reluctant to say so because
that may mean that in future they may not get the finances that
they currently have?
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[114] Mr Milne: Yes, I
think there’s no doubt about that. That’s largely how
the world works. But I think that’s where an asset-based
approach for communities definitely helps. We can point to
significant examples where communities now have very substantial
resources ongoing—[Interruption.]
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[115] Bethan
Jenkins: I hope he’s not carrying on oblivious.
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[116] Jenny
Rathbone: Perhaps we could just have sound. It is helpful to
see him but the sound may be better if we lose the
vision—[Inaudible.]
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[117] Bethan
Jenkins: Do you want to go private until we sort it?
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[118] John
Griffiths: I think we better had, hadn’t we? We’d
better pause for a hopefully short interval.
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Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 10:25 a 10:26.
The meeting adjourned between 10:25 and 10:26.
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[119] Mr Milne:
I’m sorry about that—my daughter phoned me there.
It’s very unhelpful of her, I apologise.
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[120]
John Griffiths:
Okay—
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[121] Mr Milne:
We were talking, just remind me, about duplication and we were then
talking about the impact of the relationship between individual
projects from the Government and people having to say that things
are going well. Yes, I think that’s a significant challenge.
I was going on to say that, however, in asset-based regeneration,
there are examples of communities that have been successful in
getting hold of assets and processes that bring them independent
income streams. It’s very interesting, the way in which that
shifts the relationship. In quite remote parts of Scotland, up
around Orkney and elsewhere, there are very small communities there
now that have got such significant income—they’re
building their own houses, they are building their own community
facilities. We haven’t quite touched on that. I think
there’s a difference in the setting between—certainly
for us in Scotland—that more remote, rural setting, where
people (a) feel further from the centre of power and so they have
to do things for themselves anyway, and (b) have a historically
different relationship to the land and their role in it. In the
very dense central belt of Scotland, which, historically, has been
de-industrialised and in which local authorities have played a very
powerful role for the last 60 years or so, communities are having
to rediscover the possibilities of independent action. Asset-based
regeneration—thinking about what assets they have and
developing them—is a route towards then rediscovering that
independence and recalibrating the relationship with the local
authorities and with national Government. I don’t know if
that answered the question, but it’s the best I can do after
being disconnected.
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[122] Bethan
Jenkins: It’s fine. I just wanted to go on and say:
it’s interesting you say that they’re building their
own communities and effectively they don’t need the
Government support. Do you see that there’s a—?
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[123] Mr Milne:
No, I don’t.
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[124] Bethan
Jenkins: Because what I was going to ask was: because
they’re building these communities, do you think that even
though the community in that remote area could be strong, they
would then feel even more isolated from the central Government
because they’ve built this for themselves in this sort of
bubble, but then the connections with, say, the central power play
is something that is not there anymore, or do they still need that
central support?
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[125] Mr Milne:
I think that’s a very good point. I shouldn’t have
misled you in that way. I think for any asset-based approach to
work successfully for communities, it has to be within a framework
of good-quality public services, decent infrastructure in terms of
transport, sensible legislation in terms of land ownership, et
cetera. I think what we’re talking about with asset-based
ownership, as I was trying to say earlier, is just a recalibrating
of the power balance between individual communities, the local
authority and the national Government. In some cases—in many
cases, in Scotland as I’m sure elsewhere, communities have
come to rely completely on external support when their own way of
sustaining themselves, whether it’s through coal production,
fishing or cloth making, historically—whatever it
was—has gone. When that has gone, when that sense of
cohesion, as well as economic well-being, has gone from a place,
then they become dependent on welfare systems and on other kinds of
support from national Government. In Scotland, historically, local
authorities played an absolutely vital role in keeping
people’s heads above water and providing a range of services
that enabled people to sustain themselves, their families and
communities. However, it’s much, much more difficult for
those local authorities to keep doing that now as demands rise and
as the international economic picture changes in a way that makes
it more difficult.
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10:30
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[126] We know that
most—two thirds, or more than two thirds—of children
now living in poverty live in households where somebody works. So,
there’s something wrong with the economic system that
we’re operating in. Asset-based regeneration is a way of
helping communities to rediscover and relook at what the
possibilities are for their places, and how those places might then
reconnect to other towns, other cities and other economic
frameworks across the country. Some of that will work and some of
that won’t work, but I think it’s a very interesting
and useful tool for helping communities to reconsider their own
independence and reconsider their own future in that broader
context. But, as you say, the broader context in the provision of
good-quality services within a relatively benign economic framework
is a prerequisite for any of this working.
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[127] John
Griffiths: Okay. Joyce Watson.
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[128] Joyce
Watson: I’m interested to know how you look at a
community. All communities are not homogenous groups, are they?
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|
[129] Mr Milne:
No.
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|
[130] Joyce
Watson: So, first of all, you have to resolve the conflict that
will inevitably exist within those communities that are somehow
disconnected from others, and work out the equality that must come
through that process so that you don’t leave a disconnected
group within that community behind. So, how do you approach that in
this way?
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[131] Mr Milne:
That’s another very important point. I referred to some
benign naivety by policy makers earlier on, and there’s a
significant danger of talking about communities as if communities
themselves are somehow naturally harmonious and naturally mutually
supportive—this is, of course, not the case. There are
different parts of communities that fall out with each other and
there are tensions that can be exacerbated by external
circumstances. So, you’re absolutely right.
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|
[132] We support the
work of others attempting to do asset-based regeneration generally,
but for the last three or four years, we’ve been doing some
more hands-on work in some specific places in Scotland, which
we’re calling Alliance for Action places, in which we at SURF
are making interventions in particular places and are trying to,
first of all, go in and from our own existing knowledge connect up
different parts of the communities. Your point is correct: a lot of
that initial work is, frankly, diplomatic work—it’s
getting people to start speaking to each other again through us as
an external body. And it’s—I almost said
‘exhausting’—it’s very hard work,
sometimes, with individuals who are set in adversarial
positions.
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|
[133] So, what we do
is we say that there is an opportunity here. There are national
organisations that tell us at SURF that they have significant
resources to invest in disadvantaged areas. And if there is a
specific area that we’re talking about and we’re
involved in, if they can get their act together in some way, then
we will take some responsibility for ensuring that additional
resource will flow into that area. So, what we do is we try to get
broad agreement across an alliance of organisations. We use the
word ‘alliance’ because it’s not a fixed
framework; it has to be willing partners. We get them to agree
three areas of thematic priority—no more than three—and
we settle on those as the main areas of activity that we’re
going to look at. We then seek to promote higher co-operation at a
local level and, crucially, then, connect that up to where some of
the bigger resources are, through the Big Lottery Fund, the
Heritage Lottery Fund, NHS Health Scotland, Creative
Scotland—those and other organisations. If we can get some
small victories and, in some places, if we can get some small
investments in, we can then use that as a basis for building
higher-level collaboration. But your fundamental point is correct.
There will always be the danger of broad majorities across
communities, excluding particular minorities.
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|
[134] John
Griffiths: Could I ask you, Andy, whether there are any
elements of an asset-based approach in Scotland that haven’t
worked particularly well that you would highlight?
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|
[135] Mr Milne:
Yes. There have been attempts by communities to take on assets that
they have, in some cases, essentially found to be too big and
onerous a responsibility. The Scottish Government invests in
building community capacity and there are other
organisations—charitable organisations—who make similar
investments in order to try and build skills and networks in what
are called disadvantaged communities. But that goes back to my
original worry about this process—that we end up relying on
really quite a small number of individuals who have got other
things going on in their lives, other pressures in their lives. So,
yes, there are examples where communities have become overstretched
and they’ve had to relinquish the asset that they’ve
been working on, and the result of that has been quite damaging for
those individuals and damaging for the model of asset-based
regeneration over the piece. But, I suppose, to some degree that
kind of community enterprise is likely to have the same kind of
difficulties as any kind of private sector enterprise. Some will
work, some will not work. That does not mean that the model itself
is a whole failure. What we need to ensure, though, is that enough
support goes in to those individuals who are willing to
participate. Again, my worry around that is that what we do see in
Scotland—and I assume this happens elsewhere—is that
communities that are already quite well resourced, quite confident,
quite well networked, are the ones who can take best advantage of
asset-based regeneration. The communities that are poorest, which
are under greatest strain, where people are mostly concerned with
paying their rent and, frankly, feeding their
children—it’s much, much more difficult for them to
take on large-scale responsibilities, and I do worry about the
model being pushed towards them, sometimes by local authorities who
are frankly more interested in dumping liabilities than
transferring assets. That does happen.
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|
[136] John
Griffiths: Do you think, Andy, that there’s anything
distinctive about Scotland or particular geographical areas of
Scotland that lend themselves to this asset-based approach, or is
it an approach that can be rolled out across the UK with equal
effect?
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|
[137]
Mr Milne: I think the root of this policy in Scotland is
largely in the highlands and islands of Scotland. I think that goes
back to an earlier point about both the distance from a centre of
legislation—the remoteness—and the cultural mindset of
‘nobody else is going to do this for us, so we’re just
going to do it for ourselves.’ There’s also the
historic element: that, I think, coincided with the historical
legacy of the appalling structure of land ownership in the north of
Scotland, which communities—. You will remember, perhaps, the
case around the island of Eigg with the absentee landlord
Schellenberg there. The community in Eigg campaigned long to take
ownership of their island, and eventually, with some support from
the then Scottish Government, they became successful. That became
the root of a right to buy land in rural areas in Scotland. That
model was seen to be interesting and successful and so, recently,
what we’re really trying to do is to transfer that model into
the urban centre, the more politicised urban centre of Scotland,
around Glasgow and Edinburgh. That’s where we see some of the
bigger challenges in making the model work in a different political
climate, a different cultural climate and a different climate in
which communities see themselves and their relationship to power
and to the land. So, a shorter answer to your question is: yes, the
highlands and islands provided a nursery for this idea, which is
now being sincerely attempted to be transferred into the urban
context, and we are currently dealing with the challenges and the
opportunities in that urban context, with some successes and some
very, very big challenges still ongoing.
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|
[138]
John Griffiths:
Would you say, Andy, that where Scotland
is at the moment with an asset-based approach to reducing poverty
is systematic? Is it something that Scottish Government and that
the main service providers in Scotland have taken on board to the
extent that you would describe it as a systematic approach
throughout Scotland?
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|
[139]
Mr Milne: I would say that it is now. It’s very much to
the fore in any Government document that talks about regeneration,
poverty and inequality. There will definitely be a reference to the
Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. There will definitely be
a reference to asset-based regeneration and community-led
regeneration. More recently, the Government have, I think,
helpfully rebalanced that impetus with a broader one on the
Scottish Government’s responsibility for supporting a more
inclusive economy—more inclusive economic growth. So,
it’s those two things together that look to me like a better
model.
|
|
[140]
John Griffiths:
Okay—
|
|
[141]
Mr Milne: Sorry, I should also just—. A better answer to
your question is that, yes, being a small place and with the
political structures that we have in Scotland, and have had for the
last 10 years or so, there’s a broad level of consensus that
this is a good way to go. There are disagreements about how fast to
go, with what emphasis and how to get there.
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|
[142]
John Griffiths:
Okay, Andy. Finally, is there anything
you would say, if it’s possible to do so, to encapsulate the
key lessons from your experience in Scotland around this approach?
If you had to put that in a sentence, what would be the key lessons
that should be drawn that we might draw here in Wales from your
experience so far?
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|
[143]
Mr Milne: Okay. As you’ve heard, I’m a little bit
verbose, so I’ll try and do a sentence. I think the key
lessons are that this is a genuinely interesting and useful model.
It can only work within a broader framework that supports that
model and that provides a good-quality climate and infrastructure
within which the model can connect and thrive to where the bigger
resources are. I think the biggest problem with the model is
getting it to work in the areas that need it most: the poorest
urban areas where communities are too busy just trying to survive
to take on significant responsibilities like this, and who are
still looking to the state to provide better public services and
better opportunities in terms of employment.
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|
[144]
John Griffiths:
Okay, thanks, Andy. And there’s a
final, final question from Bethan Jenkins.
|
|
[145]
Bethan Jenkins:
I just wanted to ask—because you
said, obviously, that the economic structures would need to change
for people to have a fairer chance at reaching their potential. I
was just wondering, with these asset-based approaches in Scotland,
are they working to the extent of actually tackling poverty and
lowering poverty levels, or is it just about empowering people and
the softer levels of self-improvement and confidence? Because, the
Welsh Government is now bringing Communities First to an end, so
I’m trying to understand whether this could potentially be a
solution to some of the issues that we have here in Wales
also.
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|
[146]
Mr Milne: Yes and no. I think that this is—. There are
significant examples, and I could provide you with detail of
significant examples where this kind of approach has resulted in
not just greater levels of confidence and networks and cohesion,
but actual jobs—actual economic change in particular places.
I have to go back to my point that this is just one tool that can
help communities participate in broader economic regeneration. It
will be completely insufficient on its own. If you try to use just
this tool to shift the whole machine, which is creating
higher levels of poverty, then the tool will break. If you use this
tool in concert with other larger instruments, at different levels,
to the same end, then I think it’s an important element that
enables communities to participate with dignity and with purpose on
their own terms. If that can be replicated broadly enough, then
that could make quite a significant difference in the whole
picture.
|
|
10:45
|
|
[147] John
Griffiths: Andy, thank you very much for joining the committee
this morning. You will be sent a transcript to check for factual
accuracy. Thank you very much indeed.
|
|
[148] Mr Milne:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
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[149] John
Griffiths: Okay. The committee, then, will break until 11
o’clock.
|
|
Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 10:45 a 11:04.
The meeting adjourned between 10:45 and 11:04.
|
|
Ymchwiliad i Dlodi yng Nghymru:
Dulliau yn Seiliedig ar Asedau i Leihau Tlodi—Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 3
Inquiry into Poverty in Wales:
Asset-based Approaches to Poverty Reduction—Evidence Session
3
|
|
[150]
John Griffiths:
Welcome, everyone, to committee and our
third evidence session this morning in taking evidence on our
inquiry into poverty in Wales and asset-based approaches to poverty
reduction. We are now dealing with health issues for this evidence
session, and I wonder if I could ask our witnesses to introduce
themselves, please, starting with Gill Richardson.
|
|
[151]
Dr Richardson: Hello, good morning. Dr Gill Richardson. I’m
Public Health Wales’s assistant director of policy research
and international development, previously a director of public
health in Gwent.
|
|
[152]
Ms Mably: Hello there. I’m Su Mably, I’m a
consultant in public health with Public Health Wales, and I have a
particular remit for mental well-being and healthy communities
work.
|
|
[153]
Ms Scale: Hello, I’m Elaine Scale, exercise referral
co-ordinator for Pembrokeshire.
|
|
[154] Ms Wyatt-Williams: Hello. My name is Jeannie Wyatt-Williams,
I’m the national exercise referral manager for Wales.
|
|
[155] John
Griffiths: Thank you all very much. I wonder if you might wish
to make a short opening statement, perhaps for five minutes or so,
just setting out your approach to this area of asset-based
approaches to tackling poverty, perhaps starting with public
health.
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|
[156] Ms Mably:
If I can start, thank you for the opportunity to come and speak
with you. I find it interesting that we’re talking about
asset-based approaches, because, actually, I think, for quite some
time, here in Wales, we have been taking an asset-based approach in
much of our policy and in much of our practice, and to try and
capture that in a few minutes is very difficult. But, obviously, if
there are examples that we can send to the committee after our
discussion today, we’d be more than happy to do that.
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|
[157] I want to very
briefly tell you about some work that Public Health Wales has been
developing in terms of establishing some principles for community
engagement for empowerment, and, hopefully, we’ll see that
that’s quite fundamental to what you’re trying to
achieve through your discussions today. We have realised that,
building on much of what’s happening both locally and
internationally, it’s quite important for us to make a very
public statement of how we intend to recognise and work with our
communities. In doing so, we recognise that, actually, the
experience that people have in their lives is vital to how we
deliver our services and how we provide our own evidence and
support. We spoke with a number of community development workers, a
number of people with lived experience, but also some academics
about how we might do this, and we have developed these principles,
recognising that, actually, we all prefer to have control over the
aspects of our lives, every one of us, and, obviously, individuals
whom we provide services to are no different. So, how can we work
in a way that listens to the community in a very real, true and
valid way?
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|
[158] So, we’ve
invested time in developing the principles. I’m happy to
share them with you, but I will summarise them today, because there
are a number of them. As I said, we’ve developed them with
people, and it’s very much about—we can’t give
power to people, we have to just create the conditions in which
people can gain that power. We feel that it’s very
fundamental to the well-being agenda, to the mental well-being of
people, that they can have that sense of control. And we also
recognise what the evidence shows us is that, done well, community
engagement can really empower a community. But if we do it wrong,
if we don’t follow through on the commitments that we make
and the promises that we make, it can actually be quite damaging to
a community. They lose faith in professionals, they lose faith in
the system, and I think we’ve probably seen many examples of
that in our daily lives.
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|
[159] So, in brief,
really, what we’ve said is that there are some things in the
way that Public Health Wales will work that we will share with the
system, and we’ve been working very closely with our third
sector colleagues as well. The principles, in essence, are very
much about building on what’s already in communities: the
people in communities, the assets that you’ll be hearing
about a lot today, I’m sure. How we build on what’s
there: we take time to build those trusting relationships. Our
relationships with the community, when we work with them, have got
to be sustained over time. We’ve got to create space and time
to have discussions, not just present options to the community and
expect them to respond very quickly back to us. How we establish an
equal relationship that recognises that lived experience as equally
important as some of the more technical evidence that we might
cover ourselves in and protect ourselves with quite often. How we
give that language that we use: simple things like the language we
use to describe communities can be very disempowering. We often
talk about deprived communities, and it can’t feel very
motivating to live in a ‘deprived community’. It puts
you in a backward, stigmatised position from the start. So, one of
the things we’re looking at is how do we work with
communities on simple things like describing their situation and
their experience.
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|
[160] So, we have
those principles. We’re working on an action plan and some
guidance on how we spread them throughout our organisation in all
of our interactions and in all of our service delivery.
That’s just sort of telling you something about how
we’re seeking to change the way we work. There are many
examples of where we’re working that way already—I
wouldn’t like you to think that we’re not working in
that way. There are many examples where we are, but we’re
making it very explicit—that’s how we want to go
forward. If I can pass to Dr Richardson, she’ll have some
more examples.
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|
[161]
Dr Richardson: Thank you.
So, really, the essential thing about asset-based community
development for health is that it’s all to do with
participation and connectedness. We find
that, in many communities where perhaps there are lots of pressures
on people’s lives—there may be debt, there may be
family pressures, employment pressures—we do find that people
are coming from quite a low base of what we call self-efficacy. So,
the ability that they believe they can change their circumstances
is very limited. So, the foundation for any work that we are doing
with communities would very much be along the mental health,
connectedness, well-being lines, and participation in itself, you
know, volunteering, is all very important. So, we would see that
health and health boards would be working together with local
government, together with other partners, to engage with the
community and ask them what their needs were, but also what their
contributions, if you like, were—whether there are skills in
the community that are not being used, whether there are perhaps
retirees in the community who have a role that they’re not
currently able to do.
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|
[162]
There are some examples from around Wales
of where these health assets and community assets have come
together. So, the model in England of primary care at
Bromley-by-Bow has been very much applauded, where community
learning, community arts, health, connectedness, social gatherings
are all happening in the same area, the same place, as health
services are being delivered. That has been transferred in an
embryonic way, I think, to some places in Wales. So, the
Llanhilleth community is a good example, the Valley Steps
community, an engagement mental health programme in Cwm
Taf—community health champions are beginning in Wales now. In
Yorkshire, there have been 17,000 community health champions
trained, and they’ve engaged with hundreds of thousands of
community members.
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|
[163]
So, basically, a lot of what we’re
doing is combating loneliness as well, and you’ll have heard
about the Ffrind i Mi initiative in Gwent, and there are others
throughout Wales. Basically, for every £1 spent on health
volunteering programmes, the returns are between £4 and
£10, and an evaluation of 15 community health champion
projects found that the return on investment is up to £112 for
every £1 invested. So, these things do need a little
investment, but, actually, it’s only a little compared to
letting it go without.
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|
[164]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Thank you both very much for that.
The WLGA, in terms of the national exercise referral scheme,
please.
|
|
[165]
Ms Wyatt-Williams:
The national exercise referral scheme has
been in operation for quite some time now, and its main aim is to
offer referred clients the opportunity to take up physical activity
in an appropriate way. But the difference, perhaps, to normal
physical activity is we undertake consultations with them. Our aim
is to improve health and well-being over a period of time, with the
outcome being they can be independent and active long term, and
also be able to better manage their health conditions. It’s a
Public Health Wales-funded scheme. It’s operated with the 22
local authorities of Wales. It’s managed and co-ordinated by
myself at the Welsh Local Government Association, and works in
partnership with a huge range of stakeholders. We’ve got
Public Health Wales, we’ve got Welsh Government, and
we’ve got local health boards, the third sector, and a number
of partner projects, which I assist on their advisory
groups.
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|
[166]
NERS pathways, as you may or may not
know, were developed by Welsh Government request in 2009 to
incorporate not only those at risk of developing disease, but those
at a higher risk with a chronic condition. So, it was a follow-on
from their clinical intervention of rehabilitation to offer
something in the community to enable them to become long-term
independent, which has been a massive success. We’re building
greater partnerships with health to see this greater cohesive
approach between health and leisure. So, for me, we hear a lot
about ‘exercise is medicine’, but I think it’s
more ‘movement is medicine’ initially, for a lot of the
people whom we are trying to target, and, for me, this
quote:
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11:15
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[167]
‘Physical fitness cannot be
achieved by wishful thinking, nor outright
purchase’—
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[168]
it has to be the person’s choice.
So, although we get a huge number referred in to us, there is quite
a proportion of people who do not want to come. They’re not
in that right behavioural change to take up the
opportunity.
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[169]
But NERS can, from feedback from health
professionals, reduce the burden on the NHS. We are the bridge from
a health intervention into long-term independent activity,
supporting people to live well for longer. Reducing loneliness is
quite a big theme. We get a lot of feedback on that, and one of the
comments that we’ve had, which I think is really—. It
was one of our cancer patients—‘looking forward to a
future and not dreading it’, actually recognising they have
something. And, again, we promote and maintain people’s
independence.
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[170] So, we all know
the huge benefits of being physically active. It’s not rocket
science. We know, by being active, we can make a huge impact on
quite a number of conditions. But our approach is that we need to
make people consider what makes them feel healthy, rather than
what’s making them ill, listening to what they actually want
and need, and then make a positive impact, that the programmes we
offer make a positive impact by, in partnership, the person, the
client and the NERS professional discussing what the needs are,
what the issues are, and coming up with an approved pathway.
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[171] I am not going
to go through all of the case studies for the case of time, but I
know you have them. But, for me, the main themes that come back
from all of the case studies I receive are this improved social
inclusion, this connectedness with their community. Improved
management of their own long-term health conditions is a big thing.
A lot of them comment that they’ve reduced their medications,
and they’re no longer having to go back and forth to clinics
as often. Resilience and independence—actually maintaining
that independence, and not, from a fall, particularly, having to go
into care is one of the big things that they comment on. Confidence
in themselves, improving their own confidence about how they
perceive themselves and others looking at them, and
volunteering—we’ve got a huge amount of volunteering
programmes going on across the whole of Wales.
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[172] As I say, the
case—. Maybe the last case study is the one that I will
highlight because, for me, this is quite a young person—only
37—referred for depression, anxiety, and weight management
issues. She really enjoyed the scheme. She reduced her waistline
dramatically; I don’t want to go into great detail, but I
know that she did lose quite a considerable amount of weight. And,
on the benefits for her, she’s now got a qualification and a
job. She went to Zumba classes as part of her programme. Actually,
the leisure centre development team funded her to attend a course,
and she’s now running sessions for the leisure centre that
she was referred to in the first place. For me, that’s a
wonderful outcome.
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[173]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Thank you very much indeed, and may
I welcome Julia Horton to committee? Julia is the education
programmes for patients Cymru co-ordinator for the Aneurin Bevan
university health board. Julia, would you like to say a few remarks
just setting out the involvement that you’ve had with an
assets-based approach in the work that you are doing?
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[174]
Ms Horton: Yes, certainly. I’d like to open about what was
the expert patients programme, which is the way a lot of people
still know our programme, now known as the education programme for
patients. I’ll give you a perfect example, and that’s
the person you’re looking at here. I went on the expert
patient programme, as it was called then, six years ago. I’ve
had cancer all my life. I’ve got osteoporosis and auto-immune
issues because of all the chemotherapy. When I was approached to
ask if I wanted to go on to the course, I kind of went because I
felt that there wasn’t really anything else out there for me.
Because I was ill, I couldn’t get any work, and I was
depressed, lonely, and isolated. I figured that I knew everything
there was to know about my condition, so how they could they teach
me? But I was very wrong. I went on the course. I learnt all sorts
of tools about how to—not to get—. They weren’t
there to tell me how to get better. They were there to teach me
tools that I could use to take away to help my own self.
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[175] And I got so much out of doing that that I asked if I
could train to become a tutor. So, instantly, that asset was
incredible. I was tutoring for five years. I thoroughly
enjoyed it. I have increased in my confidence, as you might guess,
because I’m sat here. I now believe in myself that everything
that I’ve been through, and still will always go through, is
for this reason, because I can give something back, because all the
tutors who work for EPP are voluntary. We have 121 tutors across
the whole of Wales. We don’t pay them anything bar travelling
expenses. In August last year, a co-ordinator position came up to
run Newport and Caerphilly, and I went for the job because I am so
passionate about the programme. If somebody had said to me before I
did this course that I would not only be working for Public Health
Wales, as a public speaker for EPP, running the whole of Newport
and Caerphilly, and making a difference to so many people’s
lives, I would never have believed them. For me, that’s why I
know that EPP works.
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[176] And it’s
not just about that side of that asset, it’s—within
that group, we have people from all backgrounds, all health, all
ethnic minorities, every condition under the sun, and they come
together, and what happens there is somebody says, ‘I’m
struggling to do something, I just don’t know how I’m
going to manage,’ and someone says, ‘Well, I know how
to do that.’ Suddenly, people are helping each other, and
we’re building communities back out of the programmes, which
wasn’t something that the programme set out to do. So,
it’s just a huge—.
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[177] When we talk
about the assets, the assets from EPP are massive because people
are making them themselves. They’re coming to get their
health better, but they’re forming walking groups. We have a
huge intake of people with fibromyalgia, and somebody said,
‘There’s no support’. I said, ‘Well, why
don’t you form a support group?’ And this is
what’s happening. We’re getting support groups coming
out of the programme, and these people are supporting each other so
much. We get feedback of, ‘I hardly every go to the
doctor’s anymore, I just speak to the members of the group,
because things that we are having wrong with us, they’ve
experienced, and they’re able to help get better.’
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[178] John
Griffiths: Okay, Julia. Well, thank you very much for that.
That’s very interesting. Thank you. Okay. We’ll turn to
committee members for questions, beginning with Jenny Rathbone.
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[179] Jenny
Rathbone: Thank you very much, Jules. That was a really
excellent explanation of how expert patients, or what you now call
it, education programmes for patients, operate. It’s
fantastic to have public health and local authorities in the same
room, so I have a burning question, which is how, collectively, are
you working on persuading parents to walk or cycle to school with
their children, rather than taking them in a metal box, which
exposes them to much more pollution than if they’re
walking?
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[180] Ms
Wyatt-Williams: We have a youth policy officer within WLGA, and
I know this is part of his portfolio, to encourage this.
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[181] Jenny
Rathbone: How do we use the expert, the asset-based approach,
to get this change of behaviour?
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[182] Dr
Richardson: I think all the public services boards will
have—. The local authorities will have a duty to have an
active travel transport policy, as do the health boards, and so,
through the public services boards, they can work together. The
agencies coming together—
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[183] Jenny
Rathbone: How are we using an asset-based approach?
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|
[184] Dr
Richardson: Ideally, if you’re really talking about the
asset-based approach, you’d be working with a group of
parents who actually want to develop this, so that they will ask
for some support, maybe some high-visibility jackets, to actually
do their own walking crocodile to school or walking bus.
But—
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[185] Jenny
Rathbone: But are we doing that?
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[186] Dr
Richardson: I think some areas are, but I think there’s
probably a lot more to be done, you’re right, and sometimes
it is do with parents themselves, parents’ groups in schools
asking the council to put in traffic-calming measures, or to put in
hatched areas outside the schools, or to put in cycle racks, so
that there’s somewhere for children to cycle and store their
bicycles. So, I think there are local partnerships everywhere, but
I don’t think that there’s a national approach, if you
like. There are probably local authorities—
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[187] Jenny
Rathbones: As it’s a public health emergency, should
there not be?
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[188] Ms Mably:
I think there is an active travel working group that are looking at
a whole range of bringing different influences to bear. I heard a
colleague present earlier this week, in fact, about some work that
we’re doing nationally about campaigning on this very issue
about getting kids active and walking to school and the fact that
it’s counter to what parents—. Parents are thinking
that they’re keeping their children safe by driving them to
school and they’re actually, as you suggest, creating the
health impacts that they’re trying to avoid. But we are
working—. There are simple things like, when anyone goes to a
school at the drop-off times or pick-up times, parents are parked
all over the roads. So, there are—. We already have many
things—
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[189]
Jenny Rathbone:
You are describing what we all know. What
I’m saying is: how are we using this asset-based approach?
Are you saying that there are limitations to this asset-based
approach or that this particular issue hasn’t been a priority
in the way that you apply it?
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[190]
Dr Richardson: This particular issue has to do with a lot of the
planning, which is to do with each local government area, so
it’s difficult to—. You can encourage and can give
guidance, but—
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[191]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, encouraging and guidance aren’t
sufficient, then? I appreciate that you’ve got to change the
street furniture too, but—.
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[192]
Dr Richardson: I think it’s also dependent upon what does that
community want, because the whole thing about asset-based
development is that it’s not us, as bodies, deciding what
people want—it’s the communities deciding at local
level, ‘Well, here, we need this’, and then liaising
with their local authority and their public services board, who
will perhaps try and do tailored solutions, because the solutions
for Gwynedd will be very different—
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[193]
Jenny Rathbone:
No, I appreciate that.
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|
[194]
Dr Richardson: —from the solutions for inner-city
Newport.
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[195]
Jenny Rathbone:
Sure, sure. I suppose I’m trying to
tease out the limitations of an asset-based approach, because if
it’s—. We can agree that it’s a public health
issue, but if people are not recognising it as such then
we’re not able to do anything about it, or we’re
not—.
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[196]
Dr Richardson: We can encourage. We can encourage that asset-based
approach, but, actually, you need community ownership to properly
develop it. So, that is the challenge of engagement and the
principles of community engagement that we talked about. Perhaps,
at local level, you are seeing some of the people who will be the
effectors of change, but you do need a local champion for that
asset-based approach—often there are, but they just need a
little bit of support or help or encouragement to step forward, as
you did.
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[197]
Ms Wyatt-Williams:
Yes—
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[198]
Jenny Rathbone:
So, how does—? Sorry, I’m
just pursuing this; I’m sure you’ll want to come in.
So, how does an asset-based approach differ from a prudent
healthcare approach?
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[199]
Dr Richardson: They’re very similar.
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[200]
Ms Mably: I think so, yes.
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[201]
Dr Richardson: Co-production, it’s one of
the—
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[202]
Jenny Rathbone:
They’re just different ways of
describing—
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[203]
Ms Mably: I think they’re different ways of describing it
and I think perhaps, traditionally, we have tended to focus on the
deficits approach of describing what the problem is. I think what
the assets-based approach takes us towards is describing
what’s there to help us address those problems. I think
it’s completely compatible with a prudent health approach. As
I suggested at the very beginning, I think we’ve actually
been working in many respects with the intention of an assets-based
approach. I think, for us, it is very much how we work much closer
with our communities so that they are actually driving, asking the
very questions that you’re asking. How do we make the
services respond in different ways?
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[204]
John Griffiths:
Could I just ask then: we’ve got
the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, the public
services boards, health and well-being assessments—do you see
signs, then, that this approach of understanding the assets that
communities have and how they need to be involved and feeding up
into these processes, do you see any evidence on the ground that
that’s happening now through the public services
boards?
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[205]
Ms Mably: I believe so.
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[206] Ms Wyatt-Williams: Just at the recent chief leisure officers of Wales
meetings, a lot of this was brought up at that level, so I do feel
that it’s feeding up and down at the same time within local
authorities. But it is really about what people want. From a
personal perspective, my husband is a school caretaker and
we’ve recently started to try and implement cycling to
school. There’s been a huge amount of resistance from a lot
of parents about having cones to stop the parking. It’s a
drip-feed and it’s taken a good two months to actually get it
set up. It seems to be settling down. I know that’s just one
school, but I think it’s a similar aspect for a whole range
of local authorities. There will be initial resistance from mums
rushing, wanting to get perhaps back off to work, and it’s
just easier to drop them off in a car. I think it’s
something that is recognised as needing to change, but, as I say,
it is about guidance, at the moment, and recommendation, but it is
being looked at a little bit more seriously.
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11:30
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[207] Dr
Richardson: Some public services boards have got areas where,
in essence, the public services board team of partners have chosen
perhaps one area to try to give a little bit more support to
develop that community asset-based approach. So, there might be
areas such as, say, Lansbury Park in Caerphilly that have been the
subject of intense work, really, over years, to try and develop
that.
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[208]
John Griffiths:
Okay, and Jules, did you want to come in
at this stage?
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[209]
Ms Horton: I just wanted to say that we recently did a
course—or I actually ran the course—in Bettws in
Newport. Each week on our courses we set action plans and we teach
people about action planning to be able to achieve more. Because we
cover so many subjects and one of those is exercise, we actually
got a group together of parents—or mothers—and they
wanted to do more exercise, but it came up that it was too
expensive to go to the gym and they couldn’t get to the
exercise referral programmes at the times that were
necessary.
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[210]
One lady said, ‘Well, why
don’t we form together and then we’ll all take the kids
to school and then we can have a coffee’. Then, what’s
developed from that has been that, when some parents have to go to
work, this other group of people, they’ll take the children.
So, somebody’s going with the children all the time, but not
necessarily their own parents. From that, when I liaised with them
not long ago, I found out that they’ve incorporated it into
more of the estate.
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[211]
I thought that was a really worthwhile
exercise that they were doing, and it’s simply down to,
‘We want to exercise, but we can’t afford to do it. How
can we do it?’ It was just a simple suggestion and
that’s now kind of spread out over the whole of that Bettws
estate where people are doing that.
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[212]
John Griffiths:
Okay.
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[213]
Jenny Rathbone:
I can see the wow factor in what
you’re doing, but isn’t there a danger that those with
the least assets, you know, get nothing out of this approach?
Because you’re saying, unless we’ve got community
champions, we can’t do anything, or—.
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[214]
Dr Richardson: I think that’s where you totally need to make
sure that if you’re going to go down the approach of
encouraging a community assets-based approach, as we would want to
do, because it’s co-production, not being done to but doing
with, then you have to make absolutely sure that the inequality
impact assessments are also done. You actually may need to, if you
had a certain amount of funding, put more into pump-priming the
areas that are more disadvantaged. But, if you do do that, you will
find that—certainly using volunteering, time banking, and
qualification gaining at the same time as people are
volunteering—you do help with mental health, mainly, and
employability and education.
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[215]
John Griffiths:
Okay. We’re rapidly running out of
time, but Bethan.
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[216]
Bethan Jenkins:
I just wanted to come back on—.
Thank you for what you said, Jules, it was really powerful. I just
wanted to come back on what you said. You’re a paid position,
yes?
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|
[217]
Ms Horton: I am, yes.
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|
[218]
Bethan Jenkins:
But all the other people who are working
with you are volunteers.
|
|
[219]
Ms Horton: That’s correct.
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[220]
Bethan Jenkins:
So, my question is: I agree that this
concept is a good thing, and I’m all for empowering people,
but I’m just trying to understand—do you think
sometimes though that this would be plugging gaps that should be
done by those statutory services? So, you’re saying that all
these exercise co-ordinators are volunteers. Is that something,
with the problem of obesity in Wales being so high, that should be
something—you know, more of you, you know, duplication of
your role across Wales, as opposed to you having that one
co-ordinating role for such a big area? Because part of the
discussion for community assets, therefore, could be yourself then
saying, ‘We need to be expanding this in a more strategic way
across Wales’.
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[221] Ms Horton: Okay.
If there were more of me, there would be fewer courses, because we
wouldn’t be able to have enough funding to be able to run
them, firstly. The tutors who are volunteers—and I was for
six years, and I still do some of my work voluntary now, because I
don’t have enough hours to be able to achieve what I want to
achieve. The reason why it works so well is the people who become
tutors are people that were on the courses. They were participants.
They are people with long-term health conditions. Now, when people
come on to a course, especially when we have people come
through Remploy and such agencies, they come on and I say,
‘Why are you here?’ and they say, ‘I have to,
because you’re going to stop my
benefits’—it’s the first thing that we get
said—and ‘You don’t understand’, and then I
say, ‘Actually, I do understand, because I have done this for
many years. As a volunteer, I’m not paid to be here.
I’m here because I want to for you’, and, instantly,
you get a different reaction. For many people, not just
myself—you know, within Aneurin Bevan there are three
co-ordinators, and in Cardiff and Vale there are two co-ordinators.
So, each sector of the health boards across Wales has co-ordinators
working for them. But those 121 tutors do that because the
programme changed them. The reason why it works—like I said,
it’s because they’re not paid. So, you go into a mental
health organisation and they say, ‘Yeah. I just do as
I’m told because you’re paid to tell me’. No,
we’re not. That’s why it works better, because they
suddenly realise that somebody’s there for them that’s
not being told to go there, that they are not being paid to deliver
this, but they’re simply doing this because they believe in
what they’re doing. I think that having volunteers do that is
really important for that reason.
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[222] John
Griffiths: Okay, thanks very much for that. Joyce, did you want
to come in at this point?
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[223] Joyce
Watson: It’s sort of following on from the idea of
asset-based, which is communities knowing what they want and it
being delivered with and for them. Because we’re talking
about health, I met—and others probably have
today—yesterday a group of young people with a particular
health need. One of the big things that I got—one was in
Carmarthenshire and one was in Pembrokeshire, with the same
condition—were all the things you’ve just said. Because
these were children. It was the isolation, the management and, in
particular, social isolation, because they were young people and
they didn’t know where to go to help with that. So, I bring
that to the table, because I think the conversation lends itself to
that. It’s the signposting isn’t it? How then is it
that I met people yesterday—only yesterday—who
didn’t know where to go and didn’t know about this
programme? I just thought I would put that on the table. What is it
that’s not working in an asset-based approach?
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[224] Ms
Horton: We were just saying now, unfortunately, at the moment,
we only work with people that are over 18. It’s something
that we’re really passionate about, because we see with,
especially, mental health that children as young as seven are
struggling and suffering, and we’ve got a role there that we
could use to go and help people as they travel through adulthood
journeys—or through their childhood journeys and into their
adulthood. It’s quite frustrating for us when we’re at
conferences to see people coming up from organisations that are
working with children and knowing that we have something that could
make a difference and not being able to be involved. So, my answer
to you is: I don’t know where you go. We do struggle to get
our word out there. GPs are not always 100 per cent supportive,
because they want the full hands-on effect, rather than the other
effect. We’re very strong within the third sector and,
generally, I will be able to ask somebody within my work in Gwent
Associations of Voluntary Organisations, but I don’t know
where to send children.
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[225] Joyce
Watson: Okay. So, if I follow that through, because this is
about empowering people, it’s about taking an asset-based
approach to improve people’s lives, and we’re looking
particularly at poverty, so that could be health poverty or
whatever it is: how then do you think that this particular approach
is working differently and better towards that aim than all the
other approaches that went before?
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[226] Ms Mably:
It’s difficult to know, obviously, the situation that you
describe, because one of the things that we usually go back to is
the fact that most of our children—the vast majority of our
children—are in schools. So, our opportunity to influence
through schools is our main theme. So, we would rather hope that,
through the work that we’re doing, and the Welsh Government
are doing, looking at the curriculum, that emotional well-being and
the mental well-being part of the new curriculum is really vital to
looking at what the issues are affecting our young people who are
in school, and how we work differently with those young people so
that their voices are heard. I’m sure we all know that there
are already structures within schools, but the important thing is
that those structures don’t exclude the children who perhaps
most need them, so that you’ve got school councils and
you’ve got places where young people can make their voice
heard and make their needs heard, but we’ve got to make sure
that all young people and all children have the opportunity to use
those mechanisms or find alternative mechanisms. Hopefully, the
review of the new curriculum will start to make that far more
mainstream and far more evident and visible. So, a lot of
it—we do place a lot of reliance, I think, on what the
professionals who deal with the vast majority of our
children—how they work. Hopefully, they are working in an
asset-based approach, recognising what the children bring and what
the children need.
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[227] Dr
Richardson: And there are some excellent examples of mental
health charities, such as Mind, having a Young Minds branch and
then also the British diabetic association having a youth arm.
There are organisations that are there to support young stroke
survivors. So, there are a multitude of—they’re not
quite self-help groups because they come from the third
sector—but they very often become a peer-support group. There
are difficulties in rural areas, so we do need to perhaps think
about the use of social media in a safe way, and people having
support groups at a distance that they can access safely without
any interference from people without the condition, or adults.
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[228] Joyce
Watson: If I can, Chair—. The example I gave were
children who had a physically debilitating illness that’s not
going away. That was the example I gave. One was in Pembrokeshire
and one was in Carmarthenshire. The one in Pembrokeshire would
perhaps have been, you could say, geographically isolated, because
they’re outside the town. The one in Carmarthenshire was
right bang in the middle of Carmarthen town. Both are in school,
although it’s sporadic. And that’s why I brought it to
the table. I’m clearly not going to identify the individuals,
but the families were struggling in terms of their personal social
isolation, as adults, but more importantly, the children’s
isolation as disabled young people and the ability to meet up with
others in the same situation so that they had a social life. So,
whilst I understand using social media will connect them, it
won’t answer the questions I was raising. The real question I
was raising is: if this model’s working, is it working for
everybody?
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[229] Ms
Wyatt-Williams: The national exercise referral scheme’s
criteria is aged 16 and over—we’re not allowed to take
anyone below that.
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[230] Joyce
Watson: So, there’s a problem there.
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|
[231] Ms
Wyatt-Williams: But I do have a number of requests from parents
and GPs contacting me directly because they are concerned about a
particular individual. It’s really a discussion with
mainstream leisure: can they support them in some way, with the
support of maybe a disability sports person and the advice of Sport
Wales? So, we try our best where we can to offer something, but it
doesn’t come under the NERS umbrella. I take on your
frustration with that. We want to help everyone, we just
haven’t got capacity.
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[232] Joyce
Watson: That’s fine, I understand.
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|
[233] John
Griffiths: Okay. Jules.
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|
[234] Ms
Horton: Just from a personal point of view, as well as my role
in what I do I’m actually a para-dressage rider. I ride for
Wales and I’ve ridden for GB. When I first became disabled, I
was an adult but I had no support. I didn’t know where to go
and I then got in touch with Disability Sport Wales and they were
able to give me a huge amount of advice on organisations that were
within the area of my living. That really made a big difference to
me, but I had to get up and go and find that for myself. Once I
found the connection and where to go for that—I mean, they
might not necessarily be involved in sport, but within that
organisation, they have an awful lot of information on
organisations that are there to support certain conditions and in
those areas. So, that may be an avenue.
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[235] Joyce
Watson: Okay.
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[236] John
Griffiths: We’ve got very little time left, I’m
afraid. [Interruption.] Yes, okay. Thank you all very much
for coming along to give evidence this morning. You will be sent a
transcript to check for factual accuracy. Thank you all very much
indeed.
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11:45
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[237] We’ve got
two minutes while we set up the next video link.
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Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 11:45 ac 11:49.
The meeting adjourned between 11:45 and 11:49.
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Ymchwiliad i Dlodi yng Nghymru:
Dulliau yn Seiliedig ar Asedau i Leihau Tlodi—Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 4
Inquiry into Poverty in Wales:
Asset-based Approaches to Poverty Reduction—Evidence Session
4
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[238] John
Griffiths: We now turn to item 5 on our agenda this morning,
and that is evidence session 4 in our inquiry into poverty in Wales
and asset-based approaches to poverty reduction. I’m very
pleased to welcome, by video link, Trevor Hopkins, who’s a
freelance consultant with Asset Based Consulting. Trevor, welcome
to committee this morning. I wonder whether you might say a few
words by way of introduction, in terms of your approach to
asset-based poverty reduction and your experience.
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[239] Mr
Hopkins: Yes, okay, thanks very much. Hi there from a very wet
Sunderland in Tyne and Wear—I don’t know what
it’s like in Cardiff this morning, but we’ve had
torrential rain. While I’m a freelance consultant now, I
worked in local government for most of my career and then latterly,
from 2006 to 2012, I worked for the Local Government Association in
England. To an extent, a lot of my work had been on challenging
inequalities. Primarily my work was on challenging inequalities in
health, although there is an absolutely provable connection between
poverty in lots of forms and poor health. So, I got interested in
really in what Sir Michael Marmot would’ve called the social
or the structural causes of inequalities, particularly in
health.
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[240] After about 35
years of working challenging inequalities, what I realised was that
during the time I’d been working on it, the inequalities had
actually got worse and the gap had got wider. So, I suppose if
anything suggests you should review your professional practice,
it’s possibly contributing to something getting worse, not
getting better. It was at that point I started to investigate
alternative approaches to thinking about, particularly,
individuals, families and communities, and what might be some of
the approaches we could take that would, as a minimum, stop the gap
from widening in inequalities, but actually try and narrow the gap.
That’s where I came to my thinking about asset-based
working.
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[241] I suppose as an
overriding definition I’d go back to the first publication
that I was involved with when I worked at the LGA, which was called
‘A glass half-full’. It’s internationally
acknowledged now as a very good piece of work on this, for which
I’m very, very flattered. In that we said—and Jane Foot
and I co-authored ‘A glass half-full’—and what we
said right at the start in the introduction was that an asset
approach valued the capacity, skills, knowledge and connections,
and also the potential that exists in individuals, families and
communities:
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[242] ‘It
doesn’t only see the problems that need fixing and the gaps
that need filling. In an asset approach, the glass is half-full
rather than half empty.’
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[243] To be honest,
while that was written in 2010, I think it’s as valid today
as it was then.
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[244] John
Griffiths: Okay, thank you very much, Trevor. We’ll turn,
then, to questions from committee members, beginning with Jenny
Rathbone.
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[245] Jenny
Rathbone: We’ve heard from other witnesses this morning
and one is tempted to think that the asset-based approach might be
a ‘needs must’ approach by the public sector, given
that they’ve a lot less money and can do a lot less and
therefore they want the community to do a bit more. How do you
think the asset-based approach is in itself innately a good idea,
as opposed to something that replaces services that are being
withdrawn?
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[246] Mr
Hopkins: That’s a really interesting question and, in
fact, a very live debate within asset-based practitioners as well.
We may want to touch later on some criticisms of asset-based
working. Certainly, one of the popular criticisms is that
it’s a naive approach, that it may be politically highly
naive, and it doesn’t understand or accept the structural
inequalities that can cause poverty and cause poor health and
well-being. So, it’s a very live debate. My view about the
asset-based approach is it’s not a way of doing things. I
think if you think it’s a way of doing things, you
haven’t really got the asset-based approach. Lots of people
seem to think that asset-based working is about community
development. Well, some of the most divisive community work
I’ve ever seen done has been done in the name of community
development. So, I think what sustains asset-based working, for me
and for many, many other practitioners, is that it’s based on
a set of principles and values. If you’d like, I’ll
share those principles with you.
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[247] The first
principle is that until we can recognise that resources, skills and
knowledge exist and enhance the ability of individuals, families
and communities to create and sustain well-being, we’re not
working in an asset-based way. Lots of interpretations of poverty
tend to stigmatise or, at worst, demonise communities, and see that
poverty as their own fault. An asset-based approach doesn’t
say that. It says everyone has potential. Secondly, if we always
start with the problems, we’re only seeing half the picture.
And every community—. There isn’t a single
community—. I mean, I come from a very similar area to bits
of Wales—Durham—an ex-mining area: a massive run-down
of the major industries that sustained this place, and yet the
communities around here are active and vibrant and have strong
traditions and strong social activities that connect them. So, we
need to see communities, individuals and families as—. We
need to look at what they’ve got. We need to look at their
assets rather than just focus on the problems.
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[248] And
secondly—and there’s been a huge amount of research on
this over the last 20 years—what’s good for people is
friendship, is self-esteem, is feeling effective, both personally
and collectively, and also being connected into strong networks,
whether they are family networks, social networks or work networks.
And we know the research is pretty unequivocal on the fact that
this is very good for us. So, they’re the principles. I think
if you see those principles, if you sign up to those principles,
you’re starting to think in an asset-based way.
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[249] The values that
asset-based practitioners tend to suggest is that what we need to
do is rather than tell and do, we need to give support to
individuals, families and communities, to start to be able to what
we would call ‘mobilise’ the use of their assets. We
need to see citizens and communities as co-producers of outcomes,
not as just recipients of services, and I think that addresses when
the money starts to become limited and we withdraw services. Some
people would suggest that the asset-based approach can replace that
withdrawal. I don’t personally think that’s the case,
but I think part of the process is to understand what communities
do well for themselves and what they can do better for themselves
if we support them to do that. And actually, that has other
benefits in terms of communities then starting to own those
activities as well.
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[250] We need to
promote the things that make people resilient, so we need to
promote networks, relationships and friendships. The worst thing,
which we shouldn’t do, is to throw out what’s working
already. So, asset-based working is very much about valuing the
stuff that’s already working in communities. Lots of
communities have history, structure and activity that are very
valuable to them, and they should be continued. We need to think
about what has the potential to improve the situation rather than
just how do we address the problems that we’ve found. And
finally, unless we allow communities to control their futures and
create tangible resources that they can utilise, it’s always
going to be our solution to their problems, and the asset-based
approach takes a very different viewpoint on that one.
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[251]
Jenny Rathbone:
I don’t think any of us would
disagree with the principles you’ve outlined, even if many
public services are working their way towards applying it. How is
it an effective tool at tackling poverty, given that the report
that’s come out this week from Alan Milburn, and lots of
other evidence, is that, actually, poverty’s getting worse
and the rich are getting richer—[Inaudible.]—in
a way of actually delivering social justice?
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[252]
Mr Hopkins: Yes, okay. I’ll refer you to another quote,
which comes from ‘A glass half-full’, but also just a
little bit of interpretation on that. I think, in the times of
diminishing resources and the times of cuts to services, what,
particularly, central and local government need to do is do the
stuff that has the biggest impact. Alongside that, an asset-based
approach, if properly and correctly implemented, allows communities
to do some things for themselves that, actually, I would say
they’re probably better at anyway. I think we got into a
paradigm 20 or 30 years ago when local authorities sort of did
everything, and actually did many things that communities could do
just as well, and in fact better, for themselves. But the quote I
have from ‘A glass half-full’ says that
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[253]
‘The asset approach does not
replace investment in improving services or tackling the structural
causes of health inequality.’
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[254]
What an asset-based approach does is
attempt to
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[255]
‘achieve a better balance between
service delivery and community building’.
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[256] So, I suppose what it could do in terms of resourcing
is: if communities are supported to do things well for themselves
and to take ownership for those things—and we have loads of
case studies and examples of where that happens, and it’s
very vibrant and exciting when it does happen—it does
allow statutory and public services to, perhaps, maximise their
input into some of the bigger structural causes that an asset-based
approach is never going to address. An asset-based approach is
never going to address poverty in housing; it’s never going
to address fuel poverty; it’s never going to address low
educational attainment that drives successive generations not to
achieve well. So, to me, we keep the focus on that and that’s
where public spending goes, but alongside that, we need to work in
a more positive way with communities to identify what they want to
do, how they can do it and support them to do those things.
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12:00
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[257] Jenny
Rathbone: Thank you.
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[258] John
Griffiths: Joyce.
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[259] Joyce
Watson: You’ve outlined the theory and you’ve
started to move towards the practical, but what I would like to
focus on is the practical application. So, how would you see
practical application actually enhancing the lot of the people who
are trying to be helped? [Inaudible.]
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[260] Mr
Hopkins: Absolutely. I think it’s a combination of both.
You know, there are people who will always require support; there
are people who will always require some help. I think the asset
approach acknowledges that. One of the criticisms of asset-based
working—and particularly the very Americanised ABC—is
that it’s politically often referred to as being quite a
neoliberal approach. In other words: ‘You’re on your
own; public services are going to do the minimum, and you better do
the rest for yourselves.’ I’ve never seen asset working
as being that. I mean, to me, I think asset working’s just a
better way of doing some stuff that we’ve tried to do for
years and not been particularly successful.
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[261] I suppose the
two fundamental positions that we often approach asset-based
working from are—. The first is a technique called asset
mapping, which is: if you don’t know where the assets are,
you don’t know what the assets are, and you don’t know
who the assets are, then you’re never going to be able to get
the approach started. So, it’s very common, particularly in
areas where no asset-based activity has taken place, to do
community development work that is based on a model called asset
mapping. Asset mapping looks at the assets of individuals,
organisations and associations, which are the loose ties in
existing communities. It looks at head, hands and heart. Some of
you might have come across this idea of head, hands and heart. In
other words, what do people care about, what can they do and what
do they know about? An asset mapping exercise is something that
would happen in and with communities, often in local venues and
facilities where we engage in very open conversations with people
and get them to think about the individuals, the organisations and
the associations that are already functioning well in their
communities, which they already regard as assets. So, that’s
one way of doing it. It can be very, very powerful; a very powerful
way of collecting a lot of data. But, equally, the mere activity of
asking, ‘What’s good around here?’ already starts
to have quite a positive effect on how people do things and think
about things.
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[262] The second
approach is actually very commonly used in Wales. I think even the
Welsh Assembly has been involved in some this work, which is an
approach called appreciative inquiry. Again, some of you might have
heard of it. It was originally an organisational development
method, and it basically takes individuals, families and
communities through five key stages. The first stage is,
‘What do we want to talk about?’—that’s the
definition. The second is discovery. So, asset mapping could be
part of the discovery phase: ‘Who knows stuff around here,
who does stuff around here, who cares about stuff and who’s
passionate about these kinds of things?’ And there are other
approaches you can use—appreciative conversations.
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[263] The third stage
of appreciative inquiry is absolutely the critical stage, and
that’s what we call the ‘dream stage’.
That’s when we ask people to tell us what things could be
like around here: how could things be better? All of these
approaches are based on appreciative questions. We never ask the
negative questions in the asset-based approach. We don’t say,
‘What’s wrong?’ What we say is, ‘What would
it look like?’, ‘What would it feel like?’,
‘What would it be like to live here if your dreams about this
place came true?’
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[264] Then, the last
stage, normally, we would move on to at the second part of the
process, which is called ‘design and deliver’.
That’s much more practical; much more grounded. Often, during
your asset mapping and your appreciative inquiry process, local
leaders and activists will come forward. Sometimes, that’s
locally elected members, sometimes that’s community
activists. We often find churches and places of religious worship
get very involved in these kinds of activities. So, this way of
both finding out and then starting to mobilise the assets in
individuals, families and communities can be a very powerful way to
start this. Once we get this going there are loads of other things
that we can do: community conversations; often peer support and
mentoring is a powerful way of developing people in terms of using
their assets. We can do specific community development work. One of
the things that have become quite popular in rural areas is village
agents and sometimes in urban areas community connectors. These are
people who have a passion for, and a skill in, developing the
assets in communities.
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[265] Joyce
Watson: And have any of those approaches resulted, in your
experience or knowledge, in reducing poverty?
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[266] Mr
Hopkins: I would say quite frankly it’s far too early to
actually make a conclusion like that. A lot of the work we’ve
done in asset-based approaches has been around well-being,
community well-being in particular, and community resilience.
Interestingly, I did some work in Somerset a few years ago after
the major floods, because the local authority there had seen that
some communities fared quite well after the floods, and some
communities needed very high levels of public service support. They
really wanted to know what was the difference between those two
communities. The communities that fared well were already
communities that had assets and connected assets: places, say,
where the National Farmers’ Union was strong. The farmers
already knew each other, they had a relationship. You’ve
heard the stories of them getting animals out of each other’s
fields and putting them in safe places. Places where the church was
strong or women’s organisations were strong were places that
fared better.
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[267] So, I think
there is lots of evidence that using asset-based approaches leads
to more vibrant, more connected and more active communities, and
that also involves individuals and families. My frank view would be
that it may take a generation, and it possibly might take two
generations, or even three generations, till we actually see the
overall effects of this kind of activity taking place. So, I would
be very wary about—at this stage—saying that there is a
direct link between asset-based working and a reduction in poverty.
What I think you can see is there’s an increase in the kind
of activity that is likely to make communities stronger and more
resilient, and therefore one of the outcomes of that could be
action, externally but also internally, on reducing poverty in
those communities.
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[268] John
Griffiths: Okay. Thank you very much, Joyce. Sian
Gwenllian.
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[269] Sian
Gwenllian: I just wanted to explore some of the disadvantages
of an asset-based approach. Do you see any disadvantages, from your
perspective?
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[270] Mr
Hopkins: Well, to be frank with you—do I see
disadvantages from my perspective? No, I don’t. I love it and
I’ve been doing it since 2010. In my spare time I’m a
voluntary athletics coach and whenever anybody comes to me in
athletics I don’t want to find out what they can’t do.
What I want to know is, ‘What can you do, and what do you
want to get good at?’ So, personally, I don’t see that,
but are there criticisms, are there disadvantages to asset-based
working? Yes, there are. I think one of the primary disadvantages
at this stage is it’s tended, because of the nature of it,
and because of the fact that it really hasn’t had access to
what I would say is mainstream public service
funding—it’s tended to be piecemeal, it’s tended
to be episodic, it’s tended to happen in isolated areas.
Where it has happened in isolated ideas, it’s always been
successful. But I think that my criticism of asset-based
working—. And it’s really interesting that you’re
interested in this today. I’ve been working with East Sussex
County Council. My wife and I—she is my partner in
work—we’ve been working with East Sussex County Council
for the last 18 months, and they’re probably one of the first
big local authorities in England to actually try to do this
systematically, to do it right across services. My view is: as long
as it continues to be an add-on, as long as it continues not to be
the day job but part of the day job, as long as it continues to be
externally funded and opportunistic, I don’t think it’s
going to have the kind of impact it has the potential to have, if
it became embedded in the DNA of big public services and local
organisations. So, that’s my personal view, I don’t
know that it’s being used well enough.
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[271] Some people
would criticise—. I believe you were trying to interview
Lynne Friedli, who’s probably one of my very good friends,
but also one of my sternest colleagues, and Lynne is quite keen to
make sure that asset-based working is not—I think
you’ve mentioned it already, and one of the previous
questioners actually referred to this—used as a smokescreen
for reducing public spending, and I think it does have that risk. I
think communities are acutely aware of that, and often when we work
in communities, people will say to our faces, ‘You’re
just here to do the council’s dirty work, aren’t you?
You’re just here because they’re closing the
libraries.’ And I think there is a perception that this very
optimistic community-led approach is just paying lip service to the
fact that what’s really having an impact on communities is
reduction in public services and reduction in spending. So, I think
that’s another risk. I don’t think some people get
it—. Sorry, go ahead—
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[272] Sian
Gwenllian: I was just going to ask about, the whole idea is
based on this concept of a community and I guess a lot of it is a
concept of a geographic community, whereas maybe we’re moving
on from there as a society, that this whole concept of a resilient
community just is not going to be existing as we move forward.
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[273] Then, another
problem I see with this is that it does depend very much on finding
community activists, community leaders who can, once the
professionals have been in, who can take projects forward in the
community. What if communities aren’t interested, and what if
there aren’t those leaders around? I’m sure there are
communities that are geographic areas where that just is not going
to be possible. So, doesn’t it depend on finding the people
in the right places?
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[274] Mr
Hopkins: Yes. Absolutely, and to go with your first comment,
I’ve never, ever—. And I think one of the problems is,
as this approach in the UK has grown out of the experience in
north-western USA, and particularly the Northwestern University in
Chicago and the work of John McKnight and John Kretzmann, who you
may have heard of during today’s evidence, their work was
entirely in geographic communities. And one of the challenges that
we’ve brought to asset-based working in the UK is exactly
what you said: the UK doesn’t work like that anymore. While I
live in a strong ex-mining community in north Durham, my son lives
in Edinburgh and doesn’t even know the names of his next-door
neighbours, but is highly networked through other means. So, the
view of many asset-based practitioners is that what makes a
community is when people connect with each other over a particular
purpose. That could be a health condition—my ex-wife was a
type 1 diabetic; type 1 diabetics mainly treat themselves. The
treat themselves because they’re surrounded by strong
organisations and networks that support them in doing things like
injecting themselves with insulin. So it could be a community
around a condition; it could be a community that’s come
together around a particular topic; it could be a religious
community. I don’t see that this could ever be limited just
to a geographic community. So, that would be my first answer to
that, and I think if you only ever see this approach being used
geographically, I don’t think you’re using the
asset-based approach as well as you could be. I think it needs to
be used across everything. It’s a whole systems way. As
it’s based on principles and values, you can have these
principles and values; they’re highly transferrable.
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[275] I think
the second thing is, I don’t know if it’s your finding,
but certainly my experience is that within any network or
community, there are always activists, there are always leaders.
I’ve never, ever in the 10 years I’ve been doing this
work, ever worked with any group or any place where there
haven’t been people who are
passionate about doing
something.
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12:15
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[276]
So, my view is that communities where
nobody wants to do anything and nobody cares, I don’t think
those communities exist. But I agree with you entirely. If we just
limit this to geographical communities, I don’t think
it’s going to have any impact whatsoever.
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[277]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Jenny.
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[278]
Jenny Rathbone:
I completely accept what you’re
saying, that there is no community where nobody wants to do
anything. But how do we prevent it being used as a way of not
dealing with some of the really chunky public health problems we
have, like tackling childhood obesity, which is absolutely endemic;
like getting people to make that modal shift to walk or cycle to
school rather than going in a motor? Because the response was,
‘Well, if we haven’t got the community champions, we
can’t really do anything.’ It seems to me that that is
an excuse for not doing anything about something that ought to be
top of their list.
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[279]
Mr Hopkins: Absolutely. I agree entirely. You know, I’m
going to pass this one back to you, because I think this is a
political challenge. I think embedding this, championing this,
leading this, being willing to be visible within organisations,
whether it’s the Welsh Assembly, whether it’s a local
authority, is an absolutely key job for people who’ve been
democratically elected to represent those communities. What’s
interesting is—and I sense this round the table here
today—that when I talk about the values and principles and
the way asset-based work could be used, you all agree with me. In
fact, agreement exists across all political divides as well. East
Sussex, where I’ve been working, is a classic, south-eastern,
Tory-led authority. They really get this stuff. I’ve also
used it in various other places right across the UK. What I like
about it is it seems to transcend political dogma. In fact, at a
local level, as you all know, there’s very little party
political dogma. Most local councillors are community activists,
and in that, they get an asset-based approach. When I worked in
local government, people used to say to me, ‘Oh, those b-
councillors, all they do is want things for their own
community’, and I used to say to them, ‘Well,
that’s their job.’
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[280]
So, to me, this is about leadership.
Doing it is about the operational stuff, and there are lots of
people who will do this and, in fact, the number of people who are
practising, practitioners of asset-based approaches—there are
more now than there have ever been. But making sure it happens, and
making sure that it’s not used as an excuse, and making sure
that funding continues to be delivered to tackle those big,
structural inequalities that exist, is, I think, a job for
political leaders. So, I’m sensing a little bit of a positive
feedback from the room.
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[281]
Sian Gwenllian:
Sorry, I was being devil’s
advocate.
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[282]
Mr Hopkins: That’s your job.
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[283]
Jenny Rathbone:
Thank you.
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[284]
John Griffiths:
Could I ask, Trevor? Taking on that
challenge, or at least thinking about how it can be taken on,
obviously we’ve got Welsh Government in place here in Wales,
the local authorities and big public sector organisations. In your
experience, have you seen an assets-based approach used in a
systematic way, so, not just individual organisations taking
forward particular projects and approaches, but systematically
across quite a wide geographical area, whether it’s a local
authority area or anywhere else?
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[285]
Mr Hopkins: I would refer you again, I suppose, to the most
recent work we’ve done on a big scale, which is the work in
East Sussex. If the committee would find it useful, I’ll send
you a publication called ‘Building Stronger Communities in
East Sussex from Street Corner to County Hall’, which is a
description of the opening year in starting to develop what we
would call a whole-systems asset-based approach. Now, they’re
in the very early stages. They’re 18 months into this. But
what I can say is that the local authority have allocated £3.2
million over three years to develop this as a genuinely
whole-systems approach, and they didn’t even write their
strategy until Jayne and I went down and actually developed a whole
series of community conversations, consultations. We used
timelines, we used appreciative inquiry, we used asset mapping.
They actually developed their strategic objectives for this
programme from what communities had told them, and not the bad
things communities had told them, but the things that communities
had said were their dreams—the dreams that emerged in
appreciative inquiry.
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[286]
Now, there are other places starting to
move in that direction.
Northumberland County Council, we’ve been doing a little bit
of work with them in recent years. Regarding Manchester as a whole,
Greater Manchester has been toying with this stuff for quite a
while. I think they’ve got bigger fish to fry at the moment,
but, certainly, there’s a lot of asset-based working taking
place. In some of the London boroughs, I think it’s really
quite interesting that part of what’s come out of the tragic
fire in London is that, for the first time, the media has actually
allowed some ordinary people to speak, and what ordinary people
have said is, ‘Nobody listened to us. We had ideas. We knew
what was going on. We knew what would make things better, but
nobody listened to us.’ And I’m just hoping that
that’s sown a little seed somewhere that says, ‘You
can’t just view this thing as a project. Unless you’re
willing to do this change in perspective, it’s always going
to be more of the same.’
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[287]
John Griffiths:
A further question from Bethan
Jenkins.
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[288]
Bethan Jenkins:
I don’t know if it’s going to
sow a seed, because I’ve just seen via the news now that the
council in Kensington are barring the public from their cabinet
meeting this evening in relation to the flats issue. If
that’s not listening then I don’t know what it
is.
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|
[289]
My question comes from this, though,
really. When we’re talking about listening and things
changing from a more governmental way, I can understand that it
would help in a very localised area, where you’d identify
community champions and you can make these changes in terms of
well-being. But does an asset-based approach extend to things like
participatory budgeting, to different ways of engaging politically
in processes, such as potentially, for example, in some countries
across Europe now where they’re introducing citizen panels,
and the fact that they can introduce legislation
themselves—that type of thing—so that it extends just
from that initial community development thing to something much
more—I don’t know—in depth and, you know, that it
permeates through all the political structures? That is what
I’m trying to get at.
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|
[290]
Mr Hopkins: Absolutely, and if it doesn’t it should do, and
if it isn’t, then it’s not, so—
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|
[291]
Bethan Jenkins:
This is what I need to ask as well. Are
you doing things that would extend beyond those
smaller-scale—?
|
|
[292] Mr
Hopkins: At the moment, I would say, apart from the early work
we’re doing in Northumberland, apart from the work
we’ve done in East Sussex and apart from some work that we
did in Staffordshire a couple of years ago, no, we’re not
doing that yet. And I don’t think it’s for lack of
suggesting that it would be a good thing to do. If you want to go
somewhere that I think is embracing this more than ever, then
probably the equivalent of Wales in Spain is Catalonia.
Interestingly, about a year and a half ago, I was invited to Girona
in Catalonia, about 50 miles from Barcelona. They get this big
time, but for them it also forms part of this view that Catalonia
is different and should be more independent. So, they’ve very
much taken this on as a way of working and, interestingly, even the
university there now is starting to run the university in a way
that sees itself as much, much broader and much more inclusive, and
actually values its strong connections with communities, with the
local authority and, certainly, the Girona local authority. I went
to a three-day conference there. They had Bengt Lindström
there who is one of the gurus of this way of working. It was an
absolute pleasure to meet him and work with him.
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|
[293]
It’s happening in Australia.
There’s an organisation called the Jeder Institute in
Australia and, certainly, Australian politics are very different to
our politics; it’s much less party driven and much more issue
and community driven. So, in Australia, certainly, it’s
caught on. As regards bits of Canada, there is quite a lot of work
happening in Canada, so—
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|
[294]
Bethan Jenkins:
Yes, I
know—[Inaudible.]
|
|
[295]
Mr Hopkins: Absolutely, and New Zealand as well. Interestingly,
what you might want to say—and, certainly, I think the
authors of ‘A glass half-full’ and Sir Michael Marmot
would say—‘Isn’t it interesting that, apart from
the USA, countries that have less inequality seem to have embraced
asset-based working more.’ Now, whether it’s
chicken-and-egg, I don’t know, or whether the countries are
more equitable to start with and easily embraced asset-based
working, or has asset-based working and asset-based thinking
allowed them to think about how they can increase equity in their
communities? I don’t know the answer to that, but
it’s really interesting how it’s happening in other
places.
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|
[296] Jenny
Rathbone: Or, alternatively, asset-based working works better
in better-off communities, and those who have least are heard
least, and that they get passed over, that public bodies go
overboard on saying, ‘It’s marvellous. Asset-based
working is the way we’re going to deliver more
partnership-based services’, but the poor get left behind, as
ever.
|
|
[297] Mr
Hopkins: I would suggest that—. I wouldn’t want you
to hold asset-based working responsible for that effect. I think
that’s a far greater and more structural issue, as we
probably all would agree. But what’s interesting is, in East
Sussex, while we did some work in some relatively affluent
communities—we did some work in Eastbourne, we did some work
in Lewes, which is their county town, and we did work in Hastings.
And Hastings—I was quite shocked when I arrived in Hastings,
thinking it was going to be one of those gentrified southern
coastal resorts, and the number of street sleepers, and the number
of people obviously having real issues with mental health, with
alcohol and drug addiction, was quite startling. For me, it works
equally well. It’s probably more about your political
leadership and where your organisational priorities lie, how or
where it gets used.
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|
[298] John
Griffiths: Okay. Trevor, thank you very much for joining us by
video link and giving evidence to the committee today. You will be
sent a transcript to check for factual accuracy. Thank you very
much indeed.
|
|
[299] Mr
Hopkins: Thank you for your time. And can I say thanks for the
interesting questions and conversation, as well? I hope I’ve
managed to—. You’ve guessed I’ve got a passion
for this stuff, but I hope I’ve managed to answer some of
your questions. I do hope the rest of your inquiry goes well, and I
would also appreciate a copy of any final report as well, because
it’s quite interesting to see what direction you’re
moving in.
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|
[300] John
Griffiths: Absolutely. And the publication you mentioned,
Trevor, the committee would be very grateful to receive that.
|
|
[301] Mr
Hopkins: Okay. Can I also just, for the committee, as well,
thank Chloe, who organised a lot of this? And I think she’s
worked tirelessly at this, and also, James, who set up all the IT,
which we had glitches with last week. So, I’ll send the
publication to Chloe, and if there’s any other information
that you would like, please don’t hesitate.
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|
[302] John
Griffiths: Okay. Trevor, thank you very much.
|
|
[303] Mr
Hopkins: Thank you.
|
|
[304] John
Griffiths: Okay. The committee will now break for lunch until
1.05 p.m.
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|
Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 12:27 ac 13:07.
The meeting adjourned between 12:27 and 13:07.
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|
Ymchwiliad i Dlodi yng Nghymru:
Dulliau yn Seiliedig ar Asedau i Leihau Tlodi—Sesiwn
Dystiolaeth 5
Inquiry into Poverty in Wales:
Asset-Based Approaches to Poverty Reduction—Evidence Session
5
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|
[305]
John Griffiths:
Okay, welcome back, everyone, to our
final evidence-taking session today in our inquiry into poverty in
Wales and asset-based approaches to poverty reduction. I’m
very pleased to welcome Professor Emejulu to committee today to
give evidence. Professor, would you like to take five minutes to
just set out your critique, as it were, of these asset-based
approaches?
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|
[306]
Professor Emejulu:
Yes, happy to. Thank you. It might be a
little longer than five minutes, so, hopefully, that’s okay.
So, first of all, thank you so much for the invitation. I’m
delighted to be giving evidence today. So, before entering
academia, I worked as a community development worker, a community
organiser, and a participatory action researcher, in both the
United States, in Washington DC and in Dallas, Texas, and in
Scotland, in Edinburgh and in Glasgow, where asset-based community
development was practised. After moving into academia, I’ve
undertaken several studies in both the US and the UK, exploring how
asset-based approaches have been put into practice. By working at
the grass roots and then taking a more strategic role in research,
this has allowed me to assess the claims and effectiveness of ABCD
in both the US and in the UK.
|
|
[307]
So, before I discuss my assessment of
ABCD with regard to poverty reduction in Scotland and what this
might mean for Wales, let me first begin with a definition. ABCD is
typically defined as an insurgent movement within the broader field
of community development that attempts to refocus analysis and
action from supposed community deficits, dependency, and problems
to a given community’s skills, strength, and resilience.
What’s important to note about this definition is that it is
not all that different from a definition of generic community
development. The most effective community-based work has as its
foundation the belief that local people are active agents and
authors of their lives, and seeks to work in participatory and
democratic ways with communities as actors and not as
victims.
|
|
[308] I call attention to the issue of definition
because there exists a straw man at the heart of many discussions
about ABCD, which positions ABCD as the only approach that focuses
on community skills and strength, and all the other ways of doing
community development treat people as hapless and ineffectual. This
is not the case, and there is good and bad practice present in all
the different models of community development.
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|
[309] Turning now to
the issue of ABCD and poverty reduction in Scotland, from my
assessment of the evidence, it is my view that few definitive
conclusions can be drawn about ABCD’s impact on tackling
poverty. This is for a number of reasons that have very little to
do with ABCD. Firstly, community development has always struggled
to make empirical claims as to its impact on poverty and inequality
because much of the work is based on issues that are difficult to
measure and those practitioners undertaking this important work are
not necessarily in a position to gather and analyse data
consistently over time. For example, how do we measure
‘success’ in community development? Is it about raising
confidence—but what does raising confidence mean in empirical
terms? Is it about the number of people moving from benefits into
work, or about how long they stay in work, or about the quality of
the work and wages on offer?
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|
[310] Of course, these
outcomes are crucial, but, in funding cycles for community
development projects that last typically between 12 and 36 months,
it’s hard to make justifiable claims that a particular
intervention led directly to poverty reduction since so many
elements are in play with regard to housing, income, feelings of
security and the involvement of several other third sector
organisations and local authority agencies that are typically
involved in any good process. A good community development effort
is by its very nature a collective one. Indeed, the Scottish Public
Health Observatory, in seeking to assess the effectiveness of ABCD
in relation to public health, states, quote, it is,
|
|
[311] ‘very
difficult to measure the concepts discussed in the assets
literature which makes any single source of data
insufficient.’
|
|
[312] So, adequately
evidencing the claims and outcomes of community development,
asset-based or otherwise, with regard to poverty reduction remains
elusive.
|
|
[313] So, what I want
to do, because I know time is running out, is just skip to the
second part of my critique. So, whatever fragile claims may have
been made to poverty reduction using an ABCD model have been and
will continue to be wiped out by austerity measures. The Scottish
Government opposes austerity, but because of the current devolution
settlement, which you, of course, will be well aware of in the
Welsh context, is obliged to implement these dramatic cuts to
social welfare services. So, just to give you a sense of what
austerity looks like and what it means in Scotland and the
implications this has for asset-based approaches, real-terms
reductions of the Scottish Government, from 2010-11—when the
coalition Government at Westminster implemented austerity for the
first time—to 2016-17, according to Audit Scotland, are 8.4
per cent. The commission itself calls this challenging because,
quote:
|
|
[314]
‘Councils’ budgets are under increasing pressure from a
long-term decline in funding, rising demand for services and
increasing costs, such as pensions’,
|
|
[315] and also, I
would add, social care. This amounts to £1 billion of cuts to
social welfare in Scotland.
|
|
[316] This reduction
in income has translated into huge cuts for councils. For example,
in fiscal year 2017-18, Glasgow, the largest council in Scotland,
will be implementing cuts for about £50 million alongside a
reported rise in council tax. As my colleague Leah Bassel and I
found in our study about austerity in Scotland, these spending
reductions are devastating because funding for community
development projects is oftentimes the first thing that is cut, or
they are privatised or eliminated altogether.
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|
[317] Austerity
matters in any discussion about poverty reduction. The benefits
cap, the introduction of universal credit, cuts to housing benefit,
alongside the closure or reduced provision of other community
services, mean that we’re seeing, unsurprisingly, an increase
in the poverty rate. So, just to give you a sense of what that
looks like in a Scottish context and what that might mean for
Wales, since the introduction of austerity measures in 2010,
according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, we’re seeing
an increase in the number of children in poverty, and they estimate
that the poverty rate for children will increase from 3.6 million
to 4.3 million. In Scottish terms, according to the Child Poverty
Action Group, based on figures from the Scottish
Government—they say, quote,
|
|
[318] ‘more than
one in four of Scotland’s children are officially recognised
as living in poverty’,
|
|
[319] compared to 22
per cent in 2014-15.
|
|
13:15
|
|
[320] Thus, to speak
about ABCD in this context of devastating cuts does not adequately
capture the crisis facing communities, local government and the
third sector. Can ABCD play a role in helping communities advocate
for better funding of public services to reduce poverty?
Absolutely. Can, in some cases, communities take control of local
assets to provide a limited selection of services for some of the
community? Yes. Can ABCD support participatory planning and
delivery of public services that are more responsive to community
needs and interests? Yes. Can ABCD replace local government
services? No. Can ABCD effectively scale up to provide universal
provision and coverage? No. Will ABCD be less effective in the
context of austerity? Absolutely. And, if nothing else, that is the
key message from my evidence today.
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|
[321] So, to conclude,
very briefly, asset-based community development asks some of the
right questions about power, representation, and democracy with
regard to local and national government. It also asks some of the
right questions about how we view local people, particularly the
poorest and most vulnerable. However, what ABCD gets wrong, in my
view, is that it positions itself as the best or only solution to
these problems. It is also unnecessarily hostile to state-based
social welfare provision and traffics in poorly evidenced
assumptions that the welfare state generates dependency.
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|
[322] I conclude with
an example, of the terrible tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire in
London. The deaths in this fire appear to have been completely
avoidable had the local council listened and taken seriously the
views of residents, the majority of whom are poor and working-class
black and brown people. In the aftermath of the fire, the council
still does not seem to be able to organise a sufficient emergency
relief and rehousing effort. The residents, through their grit and
determination, have had to save themselves, at least in the short
term.
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|
[323] There are many
lessons to draw from Grenfell, but the key one is this: local
people are asking the Government to do more, not less. They are
asking for their social, economic and political rights to be
recognised and respected. They have been organised and active for
years seeking better housing conditions—they are in no way
dependent. The issue for Kensington, for Scotland, and for Wales,
is how to make local and national government truly responsive and
representative to the people it purports to serve. Thank you.
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|
[324] John
Griffiths: Okay, thank you, Professor, for that very
comprehensive set of opening remarks. Jenny.
|
|
[325] Jenny
Rathbone: I wanted to pick up on—. You say that an
asset-based approach is being promoted by people who are hostile to
state-based solutions. We hadn’t picked that up, until now,
in the witnesses we’ve had, so I wondered if you could tell
us where that is being articulated.
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|
[326] Professor
Emejulu: Sure. So, this is part—and, I don’t know,
you can tell me how much you want me to get into some of the
history and theory of asset-based community development, but
what’s important to note is, particularly the American
context, because ABCD is essentially a policy transfer from the US
to the United Kingdom—. In the US context in particular, some
of the proponents of ABCD, in particular people like John McKnight,
John Kretzmann, and, of course, one of their key representatives
here, Cormac Russell, take a very sceptical view of the welfare
state, which they term ‘systems’—I think
that’s the term that they use. Part of the hostility is the
assumption that the welfare state—in some ways, they’re
completely correct—is bureaucratic, it’s self-serving,
it’s slow, it’s unresponsive, but also there’s
this assumption that, by the very nature of the provision of
state-based social welfare services, somehow that creates
dependency within, in particular, poor and working-class
communities. I’m not quite sure that there’s the
evidence to support that claim.
|
|
[327] Jenny
Rathbone: It certainly does create dependency. There are
certainly some people who manage to survive on the benefits that
are provided, but don’t necessarily feel able to seek out any
alternatives.
|
|
[328] Professor
Emejulu: That is as much about the changing nature of work and
the structure of work in a context of, of course,
de-industrialisation. So, in the US, and, as we’ve seen in
the UK, when you have good paying jobs leave from these countries
to overseas, we have to put that in the context—we have to
always understand ABCD in a much broader context of the changing
nature of work, and the changing nature of, and these dramatic cuts
to, the social welfare state. So, these are in some ways a
philosophical difference, but there’s also good empirical
work that says, generally speaking, people don’t languish on
benefits. People cycle in and out of work, and the issue is about
the lack of availability of good-quality work and decently paid
work.
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|
[329] Jenny
Rathbone: But you nevertheless would accept that an asset-based
approach is a positive contribution to helping to reshape public
services to make them more accepting of partnership
arrangements.
|
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[330] Professor
Emejulu: It depends. It depends on how asset-based approaches
are considered and how they seek to put into practice. I guess for
me the issue is that there’s nothing particularly new about
this analysis that the welfare state is bureaucratic and
unresponsive. That exists within community development already.
That exists across a range of different areas. There’s
nothing unique to asset-based community development in that
regard.
|
|
[331] Jenny
Rathbone: Okay. Leaving aside what’s gone on in the
United States, which is quite a different discourse to what goes on
in the UK, where we still think it’s a good idea to have
health services free at the point of need, just looking at the way
in which Oxfam has interpreted an asset-based approach to some of
the solutions—I’m just trying to remember what they
call it—but the approach that they are advocating for, I
think, nine different communities, I just wondered if that is any
different to what you are aware is what is termed ABCD in other
parts of the world.
|
|
[332] Professor
Emejulu: No. This is probably what is ABCD’s, in some
ways, biggest asset, as it were, as well as its biggest problem,
that it’s such a slippery definition—it’s hard to
know how it properly distinguishes itself from good old fashioned
community development work. What I want to do, because I’m
not just speaking the context of the United States, I’m
speaking from a context of Scotland as well—. Let me tell you
what the Glasgow Centre for Population Health says with regard to
studying these kinds of projects that Oxfam has done. If you
don’t know, the Glasgow Centre for Population Health has been
piloting work as well as studying asset-based approaches since at
least 2012. They say, quote:
|
|
[333] ‘Taking an
asset based approach is not an alternative to addressing need. In
practice, there is not a simple and clear division between deficit
based approaches and asset based approaches. Rather, we found that
in the projects studied, deficits are being addressed using a
different model of working which develops strengths and resources
rather than perpetuating need.’
|
|
[334] I suppose
what’s important from what they say in terms of their
findings is that it’s difficult to tell the difference, and,
when you look substantively at the projects, it is not necessarily
clear to me that this any substantively different practice than
what we’ve seen in the past. It just simply has a different
label.
|
|
[335] Jenny
Rathbone: Okay, because they provided us with quite a
substantive document, called ‘Tools for a sustainable
livelihood’, with their methodology, the way in which they
seek to obtain evaluation of outcomes, et cetera. But you still
think that that is little different from a deficit-based approach,
do you?
|
|
[336] Professor
Emejulu: Well, I suppose part of my concern is even using the
term ‘deficit-based’ versus ‘asset-based’,
because I think, again, as I stated in my opening statement, that
that is a bit of a straw man. Starting from the point of
identifying needs and problems in a community, such as poor housing
or people living in poverties, is—. I would not have thought
that that—. I’m not sure why that gets classed as a
deficit-based approach when it is an identification of the issues
and problems that people want addressed. So, I suppose—
|
|
[337] Jenny
Rathbone: I’m not saying it is defined as a deficit-based
approach. What I was understanding you to say was that an
asset-based approach was no different from a deficit-based
approach.
|
|
[338] Professor
Emejulu: Yes, and I stand by that, because, particularly in the
Scottish context, we’ve seen lots of different ways of
measuring work, lots of different ways of evaluating work.
There’s learning and evaluation in planning—LEAP, as
it’s called. There’s a LEAP 1 and LEAP 2 in the
Scottish context. There’s ‘how good is our community
learning and development?’, as well as—there’s
another one as well. And, to be honest, it is not clear how that is
all that different from an asset-based approach.
|
|
[339] Jenny Rathbone: Okay, but how would you
say that an asset-based approach differs from more difficult,
traditional approaches to poverty reduction, whether they’re
from charitable organisations or from faith-based organisations,
which have been doing work with communities who are struggling for
200 years?
|
|
[340]
Professor Emejulu:
Yes. Well, not all the same communities
have been struggling, of course.
|
|
[341]
Jenny Rathbone:
No, no, indeed, but what I mean is that
the concept of working with people who need some support has been
around for a long time.
|
|
[342]
Professor Emejulu:
Yes. I suppose that’s precisely my
point. So, just to back up, there’s an adage in community
development that I actually always thought was very trite, and now
it’s very interesting to submit this into evidence, but this
adage is, ‘practitioners should be working themselves out of
a job’. So, the assumption is, you should be
working—
|
|
[343]
Jenny Rathbone:
Who says that?
|
|
[344]
Professor Emejulu:
This is one of these kind of hoary old
sayings that’s circulating in the Scottish context, that you
should be working to make yourself unemployed. I’ve always
thought that is very odd, but now the asset-based community
development has come along to say, ‘Oh, these deficit-based
models are something that’s terrible; we work with people as
objects and victims’. That is, in fact, not the case. The
tradition in community development, whether in the US or in the
UK—. There are lots of different ways of doing this work and
there’s always been a very strong tradition of working in
participatory and democratic ways. That’s what I keep
returning to. I’m not sure what the substantive difference
is, besides the assumption that the identification of social
problems is somehow a way of stigmatising or problematizing
communities, when what we know from the empirical evidence is how
you actually undertake collective action is by identifying what we
call, quote, ‘a shared grievance’. That’s how you
oftentimes galvanise people to action.
|
|
[345]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay, but the—. Another way of
looking at it is—. We heard earlier from Trevor Hopkins from
Durham, who’s co-authored a book called ‘A glass
half-full’, looking at the positives that people can
contribute to providing their own solution. We’ve also heard
from people with long-term health problems, who—expert
patients groups help people work with the problem that isn’t
going to go away, as such. You presumably don’t think that
that is a negative.
|
|
[346]
Professor Emejulu:
I’m not saying it is a negative.
What I’m saying, again, is that it’s not substantively
different. So, this idea of working with individuals in ways that
tap into their energy, that tap into their networks, that tap into
their knowledge of the local area, their knowledge of local elected
members, everything else—there is nothing particularly new
about that approach. That’s what I’m saying. Yes, that
is very helpful. That’s an interesting book and it’s
oftentimes very inspiring to people, but I guess I would point
people to the history of practice in both the US and the UK to
demonstrate there is substantive little difference between an
asset-based approach and other more generic approaches to community
development.
|
|
[347]
John Griffiths:
Could I come in at this stage, Jenny, if
I may? A couple of other Members wish to ask questions, but, before
I bring them in, Professor, I wonder if I could just ask—.
Given that you consider that there’s little substantive
difference between an asset-based approach and other approaches,
would you nonetheless accept that, in some ways, it’s
possible to achieve a psychological shift, a cultural shift, which
we heard about in previous evidence, so that you move mindsets
within communities, and indeed within those trying to tackle
poverty in communities, to take a more can-do, positive approach?
Do you accept that there’s any strength in that
argument?
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|
[348]
Professor Emejulu:
I guess, for me, the issue is about what
matters empirically, and so I suppose that’s fine
rhetorically, to take a can-do approach, but what does that mean
substantively, in terms of substantive differences in practice, and
what does that mean in terms of poverty reduction, broadly defined?
The assumption, somehow, that identifying a problem is somehow a
negative or it somehow undermines people’s positive
attitudes—I’m not sure that is necessarily the
case.
|
|
13:30
|
|
[349] I’ll just give you a short example. I’ve
just concluded this large study exploring minority women’s
activism against austerity. Now, austerity, as I’ve
demonstrated, is depressing. It’s horrible; it’s a
challenge; it’s terrible for the people who are on the sharp
end of it. The very nature of those women identifying the
closure of their community centre and the benefits cap was in no
way what we call—it did not demobilise them. It didn’t
prevent them from seeking to take action; it didn’t prevent
them from wanting to join together. It was that very issue of
wanting to defend their local school, defend their local community
centre and defend the closure of Sure Start centres—that was
the way that people were able to build community. So, for me,
that’s the issue about a positive can-do attitude:
that’s perfectly fine, but to say that that is somehow
superior to the long, long tradition that we’ve seen in
social movements and community activism—I’m not
necessarily sure the evidence is there.
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|
[350]
Joyce Watson: [Inaudible.]
|
|
[351] John
Griffiths: Okay, Joyce. I think Sian is also on this
ground.
|
|
[352] Sian
Griffiths: On this kind of area, yes.
|
|
[353] John
Griffiths: Do you want to come in briefly, Sian? And then
Joyce.
|
|
[354] Sian
Gwenllian: I understand your argument about austerity and the
need for massive, economic structural change to get rid of
inequalities. We’re not going to be able to do that
overnight. Looking at it pragmatically, therefore, what
you’re saying is that we should forget the asset-based
approach and concentrate more on the more traditional community
development. Or are you saying, ‘There’s no point doing
anything’?
|
|
[355] Professor
Emejulu: I’m not saying any of those things at all.
I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear in my opening statement,
but I think I said at the end that ABCD is really good about
raising the issue of the power imbalances between local communities
and, particularly, local government, and local communities and
large third sector organisations. It’s very good at raising
those issues. It also can contribute to other processes such as
participatory budgeting and all of these types of
things—that’s very good. But I guess, again—and
I’m sorry if this is a bit of a downer—there’s
nothing substantively different. So, all of these approaches, in
terms of participation—all of these approaches in terms of
participatory budgeting all predate ABCD.
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[356] Sian
Gwenllian: So, what you’re saying is that it’s a
bit of a distraction for us to be talking about this ABCD.
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[357] Professor
Emejulu: As long as it’s not to the detriment of other
approaches. That’s what I’m particularly concerned
about.
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[358] Sian
Gwenllian: What I want to know is: what other approaches should
we be looking at as well, then? I mean, should we be scrutinising
other community development methods, or should we be looking at
Families First and Sure Start and broadening those out? I mean, I
know you’ve looked specifically at this area, but I’d
be interested to know what your thoughts are about what we can
actually do, taking on board all the massive problems that we have.
Is there anything? Is there any point, you know—?
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[359] Bethan
Jenkins: Let’s go home.
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[360] Professor
Emejulu: I know, it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go
to the pub!’ [Laughter.] No—of course there are
things that can be done. Oh my goodness—but I like that
we’re kind of getting down to the brass tacks of
things—
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[361] Sian
Gwenllian: Well, this is the crux of it, really. I mean, the
problems are so global and structural in the way our society is at
the moment with inequality, unless we have a huge, political
uproar, revolution, whatever, which we—. What do we do? I
mean, how do we help families who are currently in
situations—in poverty? What do we actually do? Because what
we’re doing so far isn’t working in Wales, because, you
know, the number of families in poverty has risen slightly, and
in-work poverty. Yes, there are big answers, but surely there must
be—. I’d like to know what your thoughts are about what
could work.
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[362] Professor
Emejulu: It’s one of those things where we kind of
already know what works, but the problem is that this is no longer
politically fashionable. So, as I was mentioning before in my
opening statement, we actually saw a substantial increase in child
poverty during the 1990s, and that was because we invested in
public services. I mean, there is no great big mystery to this: we
actually know what to do. It is about doing things like
implementing the living wage—not the national living wage,
which, as you know, is very different. This is about taking
seriously issues of racial and gender discrimination in the labour
market; this is about investing in social housing. So, there are
very clear things we can do. In the Scottish context—because
I know a lot of these issues are about devolved and reserved
matters, and I’m not quite sure how different it is in
Wales—but in the Scottish context, we know that the Scottish
Government has mitigated the bedroom tax. These are very
particular—
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[363] Sian
Gwenllian: We haven’t done that here.
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[364] Professor
Emejulu: Well, that’s something that’s actually
quite important, and the issue then is, ‘So, where are local
people in this?’ The issue is then about saying, ‘How
do you bring local people into the process in terms of the planning
and provision and the delivery of services?’ But as I was
saying, in terms of these big issues—. If the focus really is
about numbers of people below the poverty line, if it is really
about relative poverty, then this is the point of the welfare
state.
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[365] John
Griffiths: Joyce, quickly, and then Jenny.
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[366] Joyce
Watson: You mentioned shared grievances and women and
minorities, and I want to bring something else into the equation.
If we’re looking at how we’re going to change things,
have you looked at—I’m sure you have—the unequal
participation in the economy? Because you just started talking
about gender budgeting and all of those things. Is that an area
where, since we set our economic strategies here, we ought to be
looking at if we’re saying that going into work is the answer
to everything? Is that something that we need to be seriously
thinking about restructuring, and then everything that falls
underneath it?
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[367] Professor
Emejulu: Well, it’s very interesting. We don’t talk
in these ways anymore. What is the old adage? That the best route
out of poverty is a job. Of course, that, at one point, may well
have been true, but now we have the spatial mismatch between where
the jobs are and where substantial numbers of people who live in
poverty are. We also have the problem of the issue of childcare,
which prevents many women from re-joining the labour market, and
also the issue of the gender wage gap. So, there are a number of
different issues here. If you want to get down to the brass tacks
of poverty reduction, these are the issues about the quality of
work and wages. That’s what we know will make a huge
difference. But in terms of the inquiries and that type of thing,
this can be a participatory project to do that. So, it’s not
about asset-based approaches or community development approaches
and then what the state does; it’s about saying how you
combine these approaches to say, ‘We’re going to do an
inquiry in terms of the quality of work that’s available in
our poorest communities’. That would be something that you
could join together with local people to do that would be very
interesting. But of course, lots has already been written on that
anyway, but it’s just in terms of if you’re serious
about doing something—.
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[368] Joyce
Watson: Yes. If I could take you back to—and I’m
sorry I was a few minutes late—the Grenfell Tower acting as a
catalyst for voices not being heard and change. I’ve read, as
lots of people have, lots of articles on this, but I was speaking
to somebody who lived in the area last week. What they were saying
to me was that the disconnect of the community wasn’t as
great as everybody thinks it was—they lived in the
community—and that there were lots of communities within that
community where people were pretty well connected. So, if
that’s the case, we will find the same—. It’s a
bit like the asset-based approach: how can we use what is there in
terms of driving forward what we’re trying to do, and that is
to reduce poverty? Because there will be people in abject poverty,
but they will still have really good connections.
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[369] Professor
Emejulu: Yes. So, the question is how to—
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[370] Joyce
Watson: How to use what is there and build on it and make a
difference, quite frankly.
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[371] Professor
Emejulu: Well, what’s happened and what we’ve seen
in the Scottish and also the American context is a frustration in
terms of this phenomenon of over-consultation: that communities
have said, for ages, that they’ve identified the problem,
they know what the problem is, and they simply want it fixed and
that isn’t happening. So, I think part of the job here is
about saying, ‘Well, reviewing the evidence, what have
communities already told us about what they would like to see
changed?’ and then, ‘What is within the remit of the
Assembly to try to implement those things that people want
changed?’ If that’s the lesson of the Scottish
independence referendum, that’s the message in the rise of
membership of various political parties: when there’s
something truly at stake in politics, people will get involved. But
if it’s going to be the same old, ‘We’ll talk
about this, we’ll consider this’ and then nothing
happens, then it’s the most logical step for people to take a
step back because there’s nothing at stake and nothing will
change.
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[372] As we saw just
in the last general election and, as I say, the experience of the
independence referendum—wherever you stand on that—it
was interesting by the way that it galvanised lots of people to
action who had previously never been involved, because there were
genuinely real issues at play in terms of the economy, in terms of
trade and in terms of all of these things that people really wanted
to get involved in and see a difference on both sides. So,
that’s at least part of the lesson.
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[373]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Jenny.
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[374]
Jenny Rathbone:
I just want to focus on one
area—because we can all agree that we need more social
housing, better public transport and affordable
childcare—which is the issue of health. We spend half our
budget on health and a great deal of that budget is spent on
prescription medicines. I can’t remember the exact
statistics, but it’s something pretty scary. I think
it’s one script for every individual per fortnight. So, is an
asset-based approach looking afresh at, if you like, more of a
partnership approach, rather than a ‘doctor knows best’
approach, and engaging people in their own health? Isn’t that
quite a useful way of trying to get out of this vicious circle of
people constantly being given pharmaceuticals that, actually, in
some ways, make them iller? Because they have side effects that
people don’t—. They’re used sometimes as a way of
getting somebody out of the surgery.
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[375]
Professor Emejulu:
What we’ve seen, particularly in
the Scottish context, is that those who work in public health have
been the most interested in asset-based approaches, precisely
because of these issues, because public health is not simply about
the absence of disease. If you wanted to take a health-based model,
it’s about the presence of wellness and all the rest of it,
and that’s where we’ve seen ABCD—I wouldn’t
necessarily say enthusiastically taken up, but certainly people
have looked again.
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[376]
If we think about health in that broader
sense of not simply going to the doctor, but asking how do we work
with community nurses, how do you work with your local community
centre and focus on issues of exercise, of healthy eating and all
of these kind of things, and the provision of community gardens,
but also, interestingly, particularly in relating to mental
health—because often these things are psychosomatic,
right—about lots of intergenerational work and the focus on
getting people who are lonely better integrated into their local
community—all of these things—this is where we can see
some of the promise, I suppose, of asset-based approaches. But
again, all of these things existed before asset-based approaches
entered into the Scottish vernacular.
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[377]
I suppose that’s what’s
important: this issue of thinking about health in the broadest
sense, not simply about accessing healthcare services; the idea of
thinking about the connection between mental and physical health;
the idea of being integrated into a community; an idea of feeling
safe and secure; that idea of getting people out into the fresh
air; intergenerational work between young people and older people.
These are all great models that you don’t necessarily need to
take an asset-based approach to do because this is about how to
bring services from centralised spaces back into the community, and
having the community have some sort of say in terms of provision
and various other things. So, again, this is why I remain a
sceptic, because the best work is always participatory, the best
grassroots work is always participatory and asset-based approaches
don’t have a monopoly on participatory approaches.
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[378]
Jenny Rathbone:
Okay, thank you.
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[379]
John Griffiths:
Could I ask you, professor, in terms of
Scotland, then, for example, is it your view that where
they’re at now in Scotland
at the moment is a systematic
approach to tackling poverty using an asset-based approach? Is it
informing the Scottish Executive’s strategy and policy and
key deliverers of services to that extent that you would describe
it as systematic?
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13:45
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[380]
Professor Emejulu:
Not in any sense, no. But what is
interesting has been the number of studies that have looked at and
explored what possible difference asset-based approaches could make
to poverty reduction. I quoted the Scottish Public Health
Observatory saying it’s unclear at the moment. What you see
in the Scottish context are a number of smaller organisations who
are seeking from the outside to change what they perceive as a
problem in the Scottish context. But in terms of the Scottish
Government taking it up in any kind of systematic way, I
don’t think that’s the case.
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[381]
What I will say, though, because I kind
of feel like I’m being very negative, but I suppose what you
have seen—and, again, this is not due to asset-based
approaches, this is about participatory approaches, and I’m
not sure there’s really that much difference—but what
you see in the Scottish context, which is very interesting, are the
issues about community ownership, land trust and development trust.
In terms of where you see the really interesting work about local
communities buying a bit of land, building a windfarm, installing
solar panels, taking over a local community centre that was
threatened for closure, buying it from the local council for
£1 and then running it as a social enterprise or a community
interest organisation: you see that in no systematic way, because,
depending on where the community is located, it may or may not have
access to a community centre, and it may or may not have access to
land. The example that’s always given is the island of Eigg,
I believe, where the community bought out the entire island. That
is always given as the example, but as you notice, by its very
nature it cannot be replicated. That’s part of the
problem—it cannot be systematic because every community has a
different combination. If we’re talking in terms of physical
assets and in terms of local people’s assets—and I find
that language problematic in lots of ways, but whatever—you
know, it depends. The most effective places we’ve seen are
the issue about development trusts and land trusts, but, again,
that is not at all systematic.
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[382]
John Griffiths:
No. But where that’s happened, you
think those projects have worked well and have been very worth
while in terms of reducing poverty.
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[383]
Professor Emejulu:
Oh, well, I don’t know—I
think that’s too far. Because there is at least some evidence
that those communities particularly who are involved in land trusts
are not necessarily communities that have large numbers of people
living in poverty in them. So, I don’t know—I would be
very uncomfortable with that statement.
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[384]
John Griffiths:
The community centres, perhaps—are
there some examples of where it has worked in reducing
poverty?
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[385]
Professor Emejulu:
Well, I suppose this idea that setting
up, or a community taking over a community centre that was slated
for closure by the local council—. That you would be able to
quantify and measure that taking over that centre somehow led to a
reduction in poverty—I don’t think you can in any real
way make that connection, especially given that we know in the
Scottish context we’re actually seeing child poverty on the
increase. So, as I was saying, whatever fragile gains might have
been made are being wiped out by the benefits cap, the cuts to
child benefit—all of that work. That’s what’s so
difficult about the context of austerity. Even if that may well be
the case, because I don’t know about every community centre
in Scotland, we know empirically that any gains that might have
been made have been wiped out.
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[386]
John Griffiths:
Okay. Well, as there are no further
questions from committee members, thank you very much for coming
along this afternoon, professor, to give evidence.
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[387]
Professor Emejulu:
Thank you.
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[388]
John Griffiths:
You will be sent a transcript of your
evidence to check for factual accuracy. Okay. Thank you very much
indeed.
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[389]
Professor Emejulu:
Thank you very much.
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13:49
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Papur i’w Nodi
Paper to Note
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[390]
John Griffiths:
The next item, item 7, then, is papers to
note. We have one paper to note, which is a letter from the Cabinet
Secretary for Communities and Children in relation to the abolition
of the right to buy. Is committee content to note that paper?
Okay.
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13:50
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Cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 (vi) i Wahardd y
Cyhoedd o
Weddill y Cyfarfod
Motion under Standing Order 17.42 (vi) to Resolve to Exclude the
Public from the Remainder of the Meeting
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Cynnig:
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Motion:
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bod y pwyllgor yn penderfynu gwahardd y cyhoedd o weddill y
cyfarfod yn unol â Rheol Sefydlog 17.42(vi) .
|
that the committee resolves
to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting in
accordance with Standing Order 17.42(vi).
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Cynigiwyd y cynnig.
Motion
moved.
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[391] John
Griffiths: Then we move to item 8,
which is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude
the public from the remainder of the meeting. Is committee content
so to do? Thank you very much. We will move into private
session.
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Derbyniwyd y cynnig.
Motion agreed.
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Daeth rhan gyhoeddus y cyfarfod i ben am
13:50.
The public part of the meeting ended at 13:50.
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