London Borough of Enfield

Maximising child poverty funding through One Large Intervention (OLI)

Vision in the Enfield Plan

Enfield is an outer London borough with a population of around 280,000. Thirty per-cent of the children in Enfield are living in poverty, the 30^th worst Local Authority rate in England. As a result of high levels of income deprivation, Enfield has been in receipt of Neighbourhood Renewal Funding (NRF) since 2001.

The Enfield Plan contains the strategic objective ‘to reduce social deprivation, child poverty and inequalities in health and educational attainment between Enfield’s residents’, particularly in the wards of Edmonton Green, Enfield Highway, Ponders End, Turkey Street, and Upper Edmonton where these issues are more prevalent.

Motivation for a child-focused approach

When deciding how to allocate Enfield’s 2006/2007 NRF funds, Enfield Strategic Partnership (ESP) identified reducing poverty amongst children (and, necessarily, their families) as a strategy which could prevent further increases in deprivation and improve the lives of the people of Enfield, now and into the future. The Partnership believes that:

Positive intervention can have an impact upon the future patterns of deprivation in Enfield
Lifting children out of poverty involves alleviating the poverty of their parents and reducing the deprivation in their communities

The partnership thus decided that NRF funding would be allocated to a single cross-cutting intervention focusing on improving the lives of children and families – the One Large Intervention (OLI). It was agreed that this would enable it to have a larger and longer-lasting effect than distributing it across a number of projects.

The OLI has attracted the attention of other London boroughs and Local Authorities up and down the country, as well as the Government Office for London which complemented Enfield Council’s ‘fundamental, organisational and cultural shift’ in the way it has approached the ESP (Enfield Strategic Partnership), partnership working and the LAA. In particular, GoL has applauded the ‘exemplar’ way the council has tackled child poverty through the One Large Intervention project.

The LAA as a mechanism for a strategic approach

The allocation of Enfield’s NRF grant to the OLI provided a funding injection for child-focused activity. However, NRF and LA funding alone were not sufficient to achieve the desired level of impact upon child poverty and deprivation.

Through the development of a child-focused Local Area Agreement (LAA), Every Child Really Does Matter, the ESP has been able to secure the necessary ‘buy-in’ from other partners and align mainstream funding to child-focused targets.

The ESP has embraced the structure of the LAA as a way to engage partners, secure additional funding streams, and develop joint working within partnerships and between different council departments. The LAA has acted as a mechanism for a strategic approach to child poverty in three distinct ways. It has:

§ Facilitated joint working between partners

§ Facilitated the alignment of funding streams from different sources and the utilisation of mainstream funding for local priorities

§ Enabled the ESP to target funds towards a range of services which affect outcomes for children, rather than towards a single project or beneficiary group

Programme funding and the LAA

Core London Borough of Enfield spending and a £10 million LAA delivery fund have been aligned with funding from a wide variety of partners including the Primary Care Trust (PCT), the Metropolitan Police, The Big Lottery Fund, the North London Chamber of Commerce and Connexions, resulting in £250 million of partnership funding.

The ESP has identified a range of targets in the LAA, the meeting of which should deliver a further £9 million in Performance Reward Grant for LAA priorities. These include a number of ‘stretch’ targets agreed with the Government.

The LAA in action

Joint working: The ESP is working with the Metropolitan Police to reduce crime and improve safety. Fortnightly meetings are held between the Metropolitan Police and an ESP Action Group. The work programme of the Council is aligned with that of the Police to ensure that they “are not simply working towards the same targets, but are working towards them together”.

Joint Funding: The LAA identifies a target to increase the number of young people “actively participating in challenging, supportive and enjoyable activities”. Funding sources for the target include the Youth Service Budget, the Metropolitan Police, London Borough of Enfield and Oasis Trust. The Council will combine these to provide funding for a single service, more efficient and effective than a series of separately funded services running in parallel.

Utilising mainstream funding to attain local objectives: Reducing the prevalence of smoking amongst Turkish, Cypriot and Kurdish communities in Enfield is an LAA target. Mainstream Primary Care Trust funding is being supplemented with funds from the LAA Pump Priming Grant to fund community-specific initiatives. In this way, a local priority has been aligned with the mandatory health target to reduce smoking rates.

Low income and workless families: The ESP recognise that worklessness among parents is a major contributor to child poverty. With this in mind, two new family centres are being opened as part of the OLI. As well as providing mentoring, parenting guidance, educational support and health advice, the centres will be able to refer parents to employment schemes and benefit advisors.

Measuring success

All LAA outcomes and targets have been attributed a performance indicator to be monitored over time. The ESP has committed itself to monitoring and reporting outcomes, and has invested resources in the Enfield Observatory, which comprises an online data sharing system and a staffed service, and collects data from a range of national and local sources.

This commitment to monitoring progress adds another dimension to Enfield’s strategic approach, helping partners to determine which projects are making progress against targets and to identify practices that work. Monitoring data is made available to the public in a variety of media with the intention of increasing public confidence in the programme and encouraging community buy-in.

Securing political commitment and embedding joined-up working

The ESP and the Council have worked hard to secure cross-party support for LAA priorities. This is an important achievement for any local strategy that is intended to be a priority into the future: Other local authorities have found that agreed targets and strategies have lost their momentum with a change in administration.

The ESP, already recognised as effective in delivering better public services by inspections including the recent Corporate Assessment and Joint Area Review, is committed to embedding partnership working and a joined-up approach in the processes of the Council and the ESP. However, members acknowledge that this is a long-term process which requires a reshaping of attitudes towards cross-partner and cross-departmental working, and stress the importance of both continuity of leadership and promoting joined-up processes at every level.