A few years ago, Audit Wales published a report on how local authorities were attempting to reduce child poverty. Audit Wales’s headline conclusion was that:
the scale of the challenge and weaknesses in current work make it difficult for Welsh and local government to deliver the systemic change required to tackle and alleviate poverty
That will not surprise anyone who has worked on poverty. But one of the reasons that Audit Wales reached this conclusion is surprising and also shocking.
Audit Wales estimated that at the time – 2021/22 – Welsh Government allocated around £1 billion in grants to local authorities to help to deal with the consequences of poverty (out of a budget of around £17 billion). Even worse, they concluded that nobody really knew what the true total was: the £1 billion was – unusually for auditors – just an estimate. This, in turn, made assessing the impact of the funding difficult to measure.
In a bit of better news, Audit Wales found that the funding was extremely important to local authorities, and without it poverty would be much worse than at present. But for all its usefulness, they identified significant weaknesses in grant funding: weak guidance, tight conditions, were short-term and took a lot of admin to name just a few of the issues.
Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I wondered how much better that £1 billion might have been used. There’s the question of better grant making – stronger guidance, longer-term funding and less admin for example. Let’s hope that some of those have been actioned since the Audit Wales analysis.
But how about being more radical?
What if councils were allocated a longer-term – say three-year – grant towards the overall goal of reducing, alleviating and preventing poverty, with discretion in how it was used. The allocation could be based on – say – the number of children in poverty in their area. For example, with 14% of Wales’s children in low income families, Cardiff Council might receive around £140 million.
These are chunky sums of money, with which councils would then be able to design services to meet local needs, make sure they were joined up, and spend less time on admin.
The Welsh Government would of course still want assurances that the funds were being used to tackle poverty, and that councils were meeting their legal obligations. To do this, councils could submit their plans, together with the outcomes they hoped to achieve with the grant aid.
But given freedom, flexibility and a longer timeframe, local authorities may well develop more innovative and impactful services than at present. It would be clear how much funding they are receiving and it would be possible to hold them to account for poor performance.
The lack of clarity about funding was by no means the only issue that Audit Wales identified – there was the concerning finding about weak local leadership and low priority given to tackling poverty. But in my experience the prospect of a nice chunk of cash does wonders to concentrate minds!
What is clear is that past and current approaches have not worked. Yes poverty might have been even worse than if the then Welsh Governments hadn’t had child poverty strategies, progress reports and spent £1 billion. But poverty in Wales has stuck at stubbornly high levels for nearly twenty years with little prospect of change,
Maybe its time to try a different approach? And with a new Minister for Government Effectiveness, perhaps it might just happen.
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