SoFI Seminar: The un-politics of child poverty?

An exploration of non-decision making in relation to child poverty 

                          Date:  16 January  2013                         

Time:4.00pm -6.00pm

Venue: Teesside University, Clarendon building, Room CL1.01

Chairman – Professor Rob MacDonald

Speaker – Stephen Crossley, Institute of Local Governance, Durham University

The Child Poverty Act (2010) contains local duties which require local authorities to produce a joint child poverty strategy for their area, in collaboration with their partners.The decision by the Coalition Government, in keeping with the decentralisation and localism agendas not to produce statutory guidance for these strategies, enabled local authorities to develop their own policy responses to producing these strategies and the Child Poverty Needs Assessments, which must accompany and inform them.

This Social Futures Institute (SoFI) seminar will explore the priorities which can be found in a number of the strategies developed by local authorities in the North East, highlighting areas of conflict with academic research and poverty theory.

Adopting a critical social policy approach and drawing on the work of Peter Townsend, Steven Lukes and Bachrach & Baratz, the session will also highlight decisions which ‘haven’t been taken’ and explore issues which are absent from central government narrative and local authority strategies, testing Matthew Crensons’ assertion that ‘the proper object of investigation is not political activity but political inactivity’.

If you would like to book a place at the event, please contact Catherine Nesbitt via email at c.nesbitt@tees.ac.uk