Renfrewshire Council

In 2020/21, we carried out a community impact assessment, finding out how our communities had been impacted by the pandemic. This helped us to develop a deeper understanding of the pandemic on local people and communities and we engaged with a range of families, including those with lived experience of poverty. 

This informed the development of our social renewal plan with wide-ranging priorities including targeted actions to support those disproportionately impacted with issues such as low income, insecure employment, caring responsibilities and disabilities.

To ensure our social renewal and tackling poverty plans reflect the real needs of our citizens, £75,000 has been allocated for us to develop a mechanism by which local people can continue to feed their ideas and opinions into the council in a systematic way.

During 2022/23, we will continue to work with Poverty Alliance to help people on low incomes get their voices heard on the policies and decisions that most impact their lives and help us understand their needs, especially those in the child poverty priority groups. 

These conversations will help us develop work around issues such as costs of living and how we can best support those in priority groups to gain or progress into well-paid employment.

Children with a disability are a key target group of the Child Poverty Act (Scotland) 2017. Plans to convene a steering group, scope out and commission research into needs of families with children and a disability across NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and with all linked local authorities will be progressed in 2022/23. This will allow us to better understand families experience and impacts of poverty for families with a child with a disability around all three drivers of poverty. This research will identify themes and make recommendations for progress for this particular group.