Cornwall has been successful in securing Government funding to help tackle child poverty in the county.
The resources come from The Treasury’s Invest to Save – Inclusive Communities Budget (ISB) which is designed to provide resources to develop partnerships between local authorities and the third (voluntary and community) sector to improve public services.
Cornwall’s bid, called “Real Choices – Tackling Child Poverty in Cornwall”, aims to break the cycle of child poverty for families in the county by shifting efforts from treatment to prevention. Savings made on treatment will be ploughed back into innovative poverty prevention schemes.
The bid was made by Cornwall County Council’s Family Services on behalf of a range of public and voluntary sector partners including Jobcentre Plus, the Cornwall Strategic Partnership (CSP), the Children and Young People’s Partnership (CYPP), Cornwall Voluntary Sector Forum (CVSF) and Inclusion Cornwall.
The project aims to
- Improve employment rates, especially for hard to reach groups
- Narrow inequalities of opportunity for poor children, especially educational opportunities
- Improve the full range of local services for children, including childcare and other early years activities, cultural and leisure activities and family support services
- Promote the take up of benefits and tax credits locally
- Show a cost saving over the life of the project resulting from new approaches to service delivery
It fits in with nine Local Area Agreement (LAA) priorities which impact on Child Poverty as well as the Every Child Matters Agenda, the objectives of the Child Poverty Accord and the Social Inclusion agenda, in particular the ‘cycle of deprivation’, an issue of particular concern to rural communities like Cornwall.
Key features include:
- Extensive partnership support across all sectors via the CSP and its family of partnerships
- Innovative countywide mapping exercise to establish ‘virtual’ wards made up of families on benefits with a defined common need, as opposed to where they live which provides a solution to tackling pockets of deprivation. The delivery of services to families within these “wards” will be joined up to provide better co-ordinated, localised agency support
- Appointment of a Child Poverty Co-ordinator to cement the priorities of the Child Poverty Accord and relevant strands of the LAA
Cornwall was one of 24 successful bids from 140 applications nationwide. The funding comes to £575,500 between now and 2010 and will be match funded with money from Family Services’ general Sure Start fund, Jobcentre Plus, North Cornwall District Council and Caradon District Council. The group is now in discussion with a range of voluntary sector groups and the Eden Project about their involvement.
Head of Family Services and project co-ordinator Richard Williams said: “The whole thinking behind our bid is that prevention is better than cure. Families living in poverty are often in contact with multiple agencies, with families costing statutory services tens of thousands of pounds every year. We know that, in order to break the cycle of poverty, we need to address the needs of the family as a whole and to intervene early when its needed, not when triggered by a major event down the line.
“We already have a very strong Cornish network of public, voluntary and community sector partners, actively involved in countywide and local partnerships for children and we are delighted to have been successful in our bid for funding so we work more closely on improving child poverty by combining our experience, skills and local knowledge.
“Every child and young person must have the chance to fulfil their potential and, to allow this, we must be open to change the way we are delivering our services, we need to integrate information across services and ensure professionals share concerns at an early stage. In the long term, as well as better outcomes for families in poverty, we expect there to be significant financial savings.”
Since it was set up in 1998, the ISB has funded over 460 partnership projects worth nearly £450 million, of which nearly £100 million has been allocated to projects involving third sector organisations. The ISB is committed to achieving maximum benefit from the implementation of the ideas it has helped to foster and integrating these lessons within the future provision of public services.
The focus on Round 9 is on:
- Developing the third sector’s role in service delivery and building fairer communities – projects that deliver cash releasing efficiencies; and
- Projects that are consistent and aligned with the delivery of LAAs and Community Strategies.
The Government recognises the need to deliver world-class public services and places a great emphasis on allowing innovative ways to meet the diverse and changing needs of service users. Alongside reform, innovation, efficiency and investment, the Government believes that partnerships between public, private and third sectors are key to improving service delivery.
It is widely accepted that the third sector, through its flexibility and the richness of its diversity, is sometimes better placed than the public or private sectors in reaching certain groups within society. The ISB’s focus on promoting the third sector’s delivery of public services is recognition of this.
Further information is available at www.isb.gov.uk
NOTES TO EDITORS
The Invest to Save – Inclusive Communities Budget (ISB) provides support for pilot projects which increase the extent of joint working between public sector bodies and third sector organisations, identify innovative ways of delivering public services and reduce the cost of delivering the services and/or improve the quality and effectiveness of services delivered to the public. This is the ninth round of the ISB.
The Treasury consulted the relevant central Government department and the independent ISB Review Committee, assessed bids using a pre-determined, published set of criteria before making recommendations to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury who made the final decision on the winning bids, following consultation with the Minister for the Third Sector.
Cornwall now has to agree an implementation plan with the Treasury. The project has to provide six-monthly progress reports and carry out an evaluation of its success once it has been completed as well as an interim evaluation exercise.
An additional £90 million was allocated to the ISB during the 2004 Spending Review. Of this, £43.5 million was allocated during ISB Round 7 (2005) and £31 million during Round 8 (2006). A total of £13.5 million (net of running costs) of the £90 million has now been allocated for Round 9.
The high level objectives of the Child Poverty Accord are to: improve employment; reduce inequalities; improve access to full services; improve benefit take up.
Details of current ISB projects can be found on the ‘Projects’ page of the ISB website at: www.isb.gov.uk
For more information or to set up interviews please contact Trisha Hewitt on 01872 274098 or for information on Invest to Save email to invest.save@hmtreasury.gov.uk
