The Poverty Alliance First Annual Challenge Poverty Lecture

With a new round of cuts to social security imminent, endemic levels of child poverty and thousands of people trapped in low paid and insecure employment, the challenge of overcoming poverty is substantial. In the first annual Challenge Poverty lecture Naomi Eisenstadt, the Scottish Government’s new Independent Advisor on Poverty and Inequality, will set out what she sees as some of the most significant problems that need to be addressed in order to make progress on tackling poverty in Scotland.

Naomi Eisenstadt was appointed Independent Advisor in June 2015. As well as being an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, she was previously the Director of SureStart and of the UK Government’s Social Exclusion Task Force. She has a wealth of experience in addressing child and family poverty and will now apply this experience to scrutinising the anti-poverty work of the Scottish Government. In her lecture Naomi will outline some of the key tensions in anti-poverty strategies: reducing poverty now by increasing family incomes, or reducing the impact of poverty by services that ameliorate its scarring long term effects; should you concentrate on large groups of the marginally poor, or smaller groups who are characterised by multiple deprivation and complex problems. What policy levers are currently with the Scottish Government?

She will also talk about the work she has been carrying out since her appointment, and highlight the emerging priorities for addressing poverty in Scotland.

The lecture will be followed by an opportunity for questions from the audience, which will be chaired by Libby Brookes, Scotland correspondent for The Guardian.