The Commission’s first Annual Public Meeting took place on 21 June. The aim of the event was to consult on future priorities for the work of the Commission and brought together people with lived experience of poverty and inequality and others whose experience comes from service delivery, policy development, or research.
In order to inform our work priorities, the Commission had already held a number of meetings and roundtable discussions with local Fairness Commissions, third sector organisations, academics and the Scottish Youth Parliament. We had also commissioned a review of evidence about the views and experiences of people with lived experience of poverty and inequality in Scotland. We used the initial findings from all this work to inform discussions at the public meeting.
The conversations at the event were centred around the themes of wealth, household income and household expenditure and for each theme we invited a guest speaker along:
- Torsten Bell, director of the Resolution Foundation, spoke about wealth inequalities, how wealth is unevenly distributed in Scotland and the impact this has. You can see Torsten’s presentation at https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2018/06/Trillion-pound-pie-web-slides.pdf
- Elaine Downie and Jackie Stockdale from the Poverty Truth Commission gave a presentation about household income and the precarious nature of family finances and the difficulties people face when their incomes are very low. You can read Elaine and Jackie’s presentation here Poverty Truth Commission – presentation
- Jack Monroe – Campaigner, author and journalist talked about household expenditure and her own experiences of living on a very low income as a single mum.
After each of our speakers we held table discussions with attendees to ask what they thought the Commission’s priorities should be, and to hear about what they thought would make the biggest difference to those who are locked in a daily struggle to make ends meet.
There were some great conversations during the day and we have taken away all the feedback and are using this to develop proposals for the Commission’s priorities which we will share over the summer. We would like to thank everyone who helped facilitate and who took part in the meeting.
Some useful links:
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/
https://www.faithincommunityscotland.org/poverty-truth-commission/
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/