Shaping a better society after COVID-19
For most of us, keeping safe and managing as best as we can through the lockdown are our biggest concerns right now. But at some point we will be emerging from the worst of the virus outbreak and the national conversation will turn to how as a country we repair the economy and society. We need to make sure that this conversation includes how to provide vital support and a better deal for people trapped in poverty.
One of JRF’s objectives is to ‘develop strategies for the post-COVID recovery phase, so that we can make the most of opportunities to reduce poverty in the future’. There are two parts to what we’re aiming to achieve:
1. We know that many people are currently being pulled into poverty or into deeper hardship. Policy choices made as we start to recover will determine whether people remain trapped in poverty or bounce back. We will be advocating for policies that would support people to move out of poverty as quickly as possible.
2. We will be looking further ahead at the sort of society we should be trying to rebuild. We know that our society wasn’t in a good enough shape before COVID-19. We had 14.5 million people in poverty, including three in ten children. As we emerge from the health crisis we need to ‘build back better’ to a society with fewer people in poverty.
COVID-19 has shined a light on the vital role of key workers, such as those in social care, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers, a role that so often isn’t matched by their pay. People across the country have been showing their gratitude to carers weekly. We are at a juncture where shifts in public attitudes could bring the issues facing people in poverty to the forefront of policy-making in the coming years.
We will be working to understand how public attitudes are changing, through polling, qualitative and deliberative work. This understanding will be a springboard for future campaigns to galvanise action, whether to improve job quality, reduce rents or create a social security system that provides the anchor that we need to keep society steady in a time like this. We will also be working to understand and set out how the economy and society can be reshaped to improve prospects for people currently trapped in poverty.
At JRF, we work across the four nations, and one thing that COVID-19 hasn’t changed is the date for Scottish and Welsh Assembly elections in 2021. We were already planning work to raise the profile of poverty in these elections and this will still go ahead. It is vital that poverty forms an important part of the conversation.
Of course, we won’t be doing this on our own. We will continue to work with partners who can help us achieve our aims, especially in supporting partners with Lived Experience of poverty to develop a platform to ensure they are part of public and political debate and that their priorities are reflected in our solutions.
One final point: in planning work for this ‘recovery’ phase, we are up against huge uncertainty. Hopefully we’ll be putting the health worries behind us soon, but they could also drag on a long time. You may have read in previous blogs about our internal transition to agile, matrix working that has accompanied our transition to being a social change organisation. This work will improve our agility to respond to and shape a fast-changing world.
We are determined to help shape a recovery from COVID-19 that protects all of us from poverty. If you’re able to collaborate with us to achieve this aim then please do reach out to us.
