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Poverty, Place and Change
Regeneration Seminar, 9 February 2011
Jim McCormick, Scotland Adviser – Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Sources
• Impact of Devolution on low-income people and places (JRF 2010)
• Housing and Neighbourhoods Monitor: Affordable Housing (JRF 2011)
• Tackling Poverty Board (2011):– Pockets – Prospects– Places
Impact of devolution: findings• Reserved policies had a bigger impact on tackling
poverty, but devolved policies still matter• Some need to be applied on a much bigger scale,
more consistently and for longer (e.g. Working for Families; New Futures Fund)
• Need to achieve better results from training/skills; regeneration; address ‘flat-lining’ in public services (the lowest-attaining 20% in secondary school); and drive down costs for low-income households
• Improve administrative devolution (the case of Pension Credit, Universal Credit)
Pockets: Poverty and work trends
• Poverty down by one-fifth among children• Down by almost half among pensioners• Little change for working-age adults as a whole• Unemployment: lower rate than England entering
recession but now higher. Net 50,000 jobs lost in 2009 mainly full-time among men with four in ten affecting under 25s.
• Working age people claiming out-of-work benefits fell to 16%, but rose to 18% by 2009. Biggest increases during recession in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and West Dunbartonshire.
Area concentration of worklessness: is the glass half-full?
Prospects: Skills
• For the least qualified, odds of being in work only 50:50 before recession.
• Access to job-related training for those lacking qualifications did not improve over the decade.
• Young people at high risk – fully 40% of jobs lost in recession affected under-25s.
• One of the long-term policy drivers against poverty which is devolved.
Places: Devolution & Regeneration
• Continuity: England (New Deal for Communities) and Wales (Communities First)
• Change: Scotland• Stalled: Northern Ireland• Concern about loss of focus on ‘place-making’• Housing and environment improved but horizons still
restricted• Balance between improving neighbourhoods and
linking them to wider work, training and learning
Places: Tackling Poverty Board
• In poor places, address the failure in markets (labour and essential services) as well as public services (satisfaction, quality).
• Dynamics: SIMD shows limited churn, mostly short-distance, with some thinning of deprivation in real terms. Four in five datazones in the most deprived in 2004 stayed there by 2009.
• And three-quarters of people in poverty don’t live in the most deprived areas
Risk of low income by area (2008-09)
Most deprived 15% datazones
Rest of Scotland
People living in poverty 34% 14%
People on L3 incomes 54% 26%
Children in families (L3) 70% 31%
Working age adults (L3) 52% 22%
Older people (L3) 40% 35%
Regeneration as a system• Models and mindsets: co-production or expert-
knows-best?• Skills, learning and work/inactivity• Housing, environment, demography and
flux/stability (Go-Well residential outcomes)• Unpaid work: family care, volunteering• Cohesion or disorder: neighbourliness, crime• Market and public services• Physical assets and connectivity
Challenges for practice• Priorities/tradeoffs in context of huge cuts: who
decides? • Is high-quality evidence treated as a precious
jewel or just background noise?• What kind of guidance/lead is needed to take
effective action via localism?• Can we focus more on culture than strategy, and
function more than form?• Is ‘Total Place’ likely to stick – and will integrated
budgets follow?
