Issue - meetings

A written update from Fergus Walker was noted by the Committee.

Fergus Walker provided a verbal update to his paper at the meeting. This included:

-          Scottish Welfare Fund. From 1 April to 31 May 2023, £79k has been provided against £458k funding available for the year.

-          Discretionary Housing Payment. Up to 31 May 2023, £751k has been spent, with funds remaining from the initial tranche 1 funding of £869k. Fergus expects to receive a further £192k from the Scottish government in tranche 2. This total £1.06m allocation will be split between mitigating the effects of the bedroom tax and those facing rent hardship due to benefit cap issues with ongoing work to maximise take up of these funds.

-          Flexible Food Fund. Up to 31 March, 1800 households facing food and fuel insecurity in Argyll and Bute had benefitted from this fund with an average client gain of £1400 per household. £204k has been granted from the Shared Prosperity Funding that will allow the project to continue to 2025. Fergus advised the Flexible Food Fund has won a second national award from Assist FM Community Focus Awards (the management body for Facilities Management professionals) and has been featured as a case study by the Scottish Government under the National Action Plan.

-          School Clothing Project. This is live in BC, OLI and Kintyre and is being introduced to Mid-Argyll and the Isles. There is now a live website for this project. Fergus said this has been a great piece of work with community groups and there is more to do and he and Rona are discussing how the Community Development Officers can support this further by the end of Summer 2023.

-          Scotland Loves Local cards. These have been given out to qualifying households in the area in receipt of council tax reduction. Funding for this was issued by the Scottish Government as part of the Local Authority Covid Economic Recovery and Islands Fund. He was unable to report on the activation rate and spend on these cards currently, but hopes to have that information by the end of June when he can circulate that to partners.

ACTION - Fergus Walker to provide information on activation and spend on Love Local cards to cppadmin to circulate to partners.

-          £197k funding for islands has been used to trial a top up to the free school meal allowance by £1.60 in secondary schools and also used to support food banks on islands. 

Fergus is looking to further enhance their data matching to better identify communities in particular need. He currently uses council tax reduction and arrears data in conjunction with information from the Scottish Welfare Fund Crisis Grants to do this, however, some of this data belongs to DWP and they may tighten up on the use of that data. Fergus will assess the impact of this once more guidance is available from DWP.

An exciting 2 year project is about to start in partnership with the Poverty Alliance and the Third Sector to evidence local and national factors that affect poverty. Fergus is keen to get the data from this project on the experience of those living in poverty in rural Scotland and how we can use that data to mitigate poverty, via policy changes, in Argyll and Bute. Takki advised that he had been contacted by the Poverty Alliance to assist in the recruitment of a Development Manager for this project that will map current efforts, build network capacity and concentrate on areas in most need.

ACTION - Fergus Walker to share the details of the project with the Poverty Alliance once available, via the Community Planning team.

Joe thanked Fergus and his team for the great work they are doing to support those in need across our area.

David noted that recent figures had shown a rise in child poverty in Argyll and Bute, but that rise was not as bad as other areas. He agreed there was a phenomenal amount of existing work to mitigate child poverty. He added that as the figures are post code based, this can affect the results for our rural and island communities where a single post code can contain extremes at both end of the wealth spectrum.

Ryan asked what promotion there is currently for the available funds. Fergus advised that they are all promoted across social media, the Council webpage, via Bute advice centre and AliEnergy and press releases. Lucy also noted that the funds are promoted via the CPP Bulletin that is sent regularly to all partners.