Tackling local poverty needs national system change

Local systems change is vitally important to tackling poverty. However, without a supportive national system policy change, it could all come to nothing. We must use the growing enthusiasm for local system change and the positive benefits it accrues to challenge the national policy system. Only with that will we get the fertile territory for local systems to truly transform services and the lives of the poorest.

At CLES, we are privileged to be working across the country with groups of local authorities, housing associations, businesses and other key local actors to develop and deliver joined-up approaches to tackling poverty and inequality. Over time, duplications, gaps and silos in provision have become common features in many of these local systems. This has meant that in some places provision has not been as effective as it could be, with complicated patterns of deprivation being merely managed, rather than overcome.

Austerity, ever-dwindling budgets and increasing demand have in part led many local authorities to accelerate and adopt systems approaches and transformative practices. Today, local systems-thinking approaches are common, and partnerships between sectors and organisations, many of whom are new to each other, are all the rage. There is no doubt that these refreshed approaches must be welcomed. While terms like ‘person-centred system’ are very of-the-moment and can sometimes be reduced to meaningless jargon, the creation of such systems can have real potential to overcome entrenched and complex patterns of poverty.

However, there is a problem. In the current political, economic and financial context it is difficult to see how this can ever make huge inroads into poverty. Of course there is hope that new local system approaches prompted by devolution, newly pooled budgets or cross-sector steering boards will eradicate poverty. However, these hopes arrive in the boardroom hand-in-hand with an elephant: for every positive step towards poverty alleviation being made by local systems change, there are national barriers.

Recent national government policies such as welfare cuts and sanctions, as well as longer term issues such as consistently low funding for mental health, are deepening and hardening the circumstances for the poorest. Recent national announcements, like a focus on home ownership at the expense of social housing, bring more doom and gloom. On an even more expansive scale, the continued fragile state of the global economy could mean that further economic crises deepen the very poverty and inequality that progressive local systems change seeks to overcome. Such an expansive catalogue of national and international issues mean that, although local systems change is vital, our updated local structures may, at best, continue to merely maintain the level of overall poverty, rather than delivering on the promise to make things better.

However, we must not give up on changing our systems. Instead, the challenge is to take both the lessons learnt and positive outcomes that continue to be achieved by local systems change and use this evidence to influence national systems change. Localities must not sit back and accept the top-down imposition of national policies that work against the very things they are trying to achieve. Instead, localities need to use their newfound partnerships and collaborations to get more belligerent towards national government, and use evidence to actively seek to erode the negative influences of the wider national system on local socioeconomic inequality.

When it comes to tackling poverty, improvements to the local system are vital. But we must recognise these changes should not be the end point. Instead they are the first step towards the essential overhaul of the wider national system. We must rise to the challenge.