Child Poverty
CHILD POVERTY LOCAL AUTHORITY INNOVATION PILOT UPDATE
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
The Government set a target to halve child poverty by 2010 and eradicate child poverty by 2020. Since that pledge, progress has been made, though recent targets have been missed and there is renewed Government focus to reducing child poverty, the details of which are referenced in the Children’s Plan 2007. This renewed focus is especially pertinent at this time given the recent economic downturn.
In 2007, the proportion of children and young people in poverty in North Lincolnshire was 18.4% and our ambition, which is reflected in the new Local Area Agreement (LAA) target on child poverty (N116), is to reduce this to 14.9% by 2011.
The Government recognises the critical role that local areas have in reducing child poverty. To support this aim they announced a programme of pilots so that local authorities, in collaboration with their partners, can develop innovative approaches to tackling this issue, based on the needs of children and families rather than traditional service boundaries.
In September 2008 North Lincolnshire Council submitted an expression of interest to take part in the Child Poverty Local Authority Innovation Pilot. North Lincolnshire has since received notification that we were one of twenty eight local authorities who were shortlisted to submit a full bid, to be submitted by 28 November 2008.
The overall focus of the pilot will be to ‘narrow the gap’ for children and young people in terms of their health, education, safeguarding, crime, training and employment to prevent families from falling into poverty and to alleviate entrenched and intergenerational poverty. We will target areas of deprivation across urban and rural settings, which have been identified via analysis of available data, by working with the third sector and local partners to deliver services and support. Step change can be realised by tackling some overarching issues i.e. accessibility to services, work readiness, digital poverty, income poverty and perceived poverty. It is acknowledged that these issues manifest themselves in different ways dependent on whether families reside in urban or rural settings and service delivery will be flexible to reflect this.
NEXT STEPS
A copy of the bid overview is available on the webpage for information.
A copy of the bid document has been submitted to the DCSF for their perusal and decision.
Partners will be notified of the outcome of the bid in January 2009. Dependent on the outcome of the bid, future arrangements will be the subject of further discussions and reporting.
If we are successful, we will need to get started straight away on the first phase of our action plan.
WATCH THIS SPACE - FURTHER INFORMATION RELATING TO CHILD POVERTY WILL BE POSTED ASAP…..
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