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A new report on Fairness Commissions

The New Economics Foundation has published a new report by Sarah Lyall. The following is a summary of the findings.

Fairness Commissions report cover

In the face of severe spending cuts, many local authorities are struggling to tackle growing levels of inequality and poverty. Others are exploring fresh and participative approaches to improving the lives of their residents in difficult financial circumstances.

Over the last five years, Fairness Commissions and similar bodies were established in 23 places across the UK. Each commission set out to tackle inequality and poverty at a local level in a context of national government spending cuts.

Achievements of commissions to date include: raising thousands of people from minimum wage to living wage, exposing and limiting the activities of payday loan companies, boosting membership of credit unions, improving accessibility of advice services, and changing the practices of private landlords on tenancy agreements and housing quality.

What is a Fairness Commission?

The commission hears from local people, gathers evidence, analyses it, and produces a report which makes recommendations to the local authority and its partners. They do not have to be called Fairness Commissions and include Camden Equality Taskforce, Greater Manchester Poverty Commission and Birmingham Social Inclusion Process.

We identified ten stages in the process of holding a local commission on inequality and poverty:

  1. Scope: Decide what and whom you are targeting with the commission.
  2. Language: Decide what to call the commission and define its purpose.
  3. Resource: Decide on a proportionate budget and allocation of staff time.
  4. Leadership: Invite commissioners to participate and appoint chairs.
  5. Communication: Start talking about the commission locally and invite people to participate.
  6. Participation: Gather evidence and solutions through a range of methods.
  7. Analysis: Develop recommendations based on the evidence and possible solutions.
  8. Recommendations: Make recommendations for change to the relevant organisations.
  9. Implementation: Put the recommendations into action.
  10. Evaluation: Monitor progress, measure change, and report on it.

The advantages of holding a commission include:

  • Providing an opportunity to speak to residents about the topics that most matter to them, such as wages and housing, and to bridge the gap between electoral and participative democracy.
  • Generating a mandate to tackle inequality and poverty for the local authority and its partners.
  • Developing a ‘total place’ approach, through which the local authority and its partners define shared goals and pool budgets.
  • Building fresh insights and developing initiatives that can lead to real change.

Which approaches generate the most progress?

We found that certain approaches led to significant progress towards reducing inequality and poverty. Those that generated most progress are:

  • Supporting social justice campaigns such as the Living Wage Campaign, Just Money, Sharkstoppers and Timewise.
  • Exposing and ending injustices, for example in housing, employment and debt.
  • Brokering and supporting collective activities in order to reduce the cost of living and encourage mutual support.
  • Improving local services, particularly the availability and accessibility of childcare and advice services.

Two approaches — focusing solely on local authority employment practices and calling for policy reviews and needs assessments without making specific recommendations — did not achieve much progress.

The achievements implemented locally that would have the greatest impact if introduced on a national level include: incentivising Living Wage employers, requiring companies to publish their pay ratio of highest to lowest earner, establishing a national landlord register to improve the standard of privately rented homes, offering free school meals for children, and investing in enterprise to create good jobs.

Recommendations

In our report, we recommend that local authorities run participative processes focusing on inequality and poverty and apply the most effective approaches from existing commissions to their local areas.

With the potential for government to devolve more to regions, there is scope for commissions to be held across larger areas in order to develop recommendations for regional institutions. By linking up regionally, local authorities can speak with a louder, collective voice nationally. In this way, they can make a stronger case for national government action on issues such as good job creation, private rentals standards, social housing and the cost of credit.


The report can be downloaded here.

Once you have read the report, we would love to know your views so do please complete a short survey

We would love to know your thoughts…

Once you have had a look at the report, do please complete our short feedback survey. The survey has only four questions and takes approximately three minutes to complete.   Feedback survey: www.surveymonkey.com/r/fcreport