UofG Centre for Public Policy

9 October 2025: This Challenge Poverty Week, Professor Kezia Dugdale introduces the methodology and first outputs from the Centre's research project, the State of Poverty. This includes two composite stories designed to illuminate the systems surrounding those living in poverty, and the impact of siloed decision making.

Blog by Professor Kezia Dugdale, Associate Director of the Centre for Public Policy

Set up in 2013 by the Poverty Alliance, Challenge Poverty Week, serves three purposes. Firstly it allows everyone in Scotland engaged in anti-poverty work to raise a unified voice and demonstrate a desire to live in a more just and equal Scotland. Secondly, it gives us an opportunity to change the conversation around poverty. Save the Children, with support from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have recently published a new guide on how to talk about poverty that’s designed to broaden the base of public support for addressing it. Finally, it serves as an opportunity to build awareness of and support for solutions to poverty.

That’s where our Centre for Public Policy State of Poverty project comes in. Funded by the Robertson Trust, it’s an 18-month long project that studies poverty in Scotland as a governance challenge. Our focus is not on evidencing the extent of child poverty in Scotland; that’s a job that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation does well already. Their latest annual Poverty in Scotland report gives us so much of the critical data to demonstrate the challenge and how it’s evolving from year to year. Many others, too, have also provided a rich evidence base showing the harm that living in poverty does to those experiencing it, as well as to Scotland’s social fabric and economic outlook.

Our role in this debate is to study how poverty is governed, both between levels of government and within Government. We are as interested in how different departments or directorates within government work together as we are in say for example, how UK Government and Scottish Government policies interact.

So much of this work is focused on the system or systems and how well they function. When we find something that isn’t working, or indeed where something is, we seek to understand what the component parts of its success or failure look like. Is it down to the total amount of money spent on it and where? Is it a question of the policy design or its implementation, or the nature of the data that underpins that policy choice? Does that data count what matters? Are we scrutinising the right things when we hold people to account for the decisions the take?

In undertaking an exercise like this, it’s all too easy to think only of an enormous organisational flow chart made up of institutions, regulations, reporting mechanisms and legal frameworks at the expense of understanding what navigating the system feels like for someone living in poverty in Scotland today.

That’s why the methodology that underpins this whole project is so important. Working alongside the Poverty Alliance, we are using a mixture of publicly available data, qualitative interviews and a lived experience panel to co-produce five composite stories of different people’s experiences of living with poverty in contemporary Scotland and we’re publishing two of them today.

When you read Michelle’s story, or that of the El Amin’s, you are not reading about one person or one families experience, but of countless individuals whose lives are captured in government databases or in conversation with third sector workers. Alongside each published story we also have an infographic giving a flavour of the evidence that underpins their reality - you can view Michelle's here and the El-Amin's here. These stories are designed to illuminate the systems surrounding those living in poverty, and the impact of siloed decision making.

But we don’t just want to shine a light on the governance problem. We are actively working with policy partners to help develop and drive solutions in our Policy Labs.

Policy Labs are solution focused and made up of practitioners from the system itself. That means using our convening power as the Centre for Public Policy to bring together leading academics alongside senior civil servants, leaders of local authorities, non governmental agencies and third sector organisations – all, critically, with the levers to affect change - together to work out how we change the system so that it works better for the people at the heart of our composite stories.

To date, we’ve started by placing Michelle and the El-Amin’s at the centre of our systems mapping – drawing out all the key characteristics of their story. We then identify all the policies that shape their life, before defining them by the layer of government that makes the decision about the detail of those policies. For example - if it’s childcare entitlements it's Scottish Government, if it’s the detail of Universal Credit, it’s the UK Government, if it’s a local community centre closing, it’s the local council. This then enables us to link up the interconnected relationships between all of these policy decisions, giving us a much clearer picture of the governance challenges we need to break down and seek to resolve. The same approach applies when two decisions from within the same layer of government interact with each other.

There will be two further policy labs before Christmas, one of which is acutely focused on that latter challenge of not just seeing all these policies in the round, but the intricacies of how you actually do preventative spending in a particularly tight fiscal environment where spending to save isn’t as easy, if it ever was.

You can now follow key developments of our project on this dedicated page of our website and you can also listen to our whole team talk about it in greater depth in this Spotlight podcast and if you’d like to help us – email public-policy@glasgow.ac.uk.

Author

Professor Kezia Dugdale is Associate Director of the Centre for Public Policy. A Professor of Practice at the University since 2022, Kez leads the CPP’s community and external engagement, providing an important bridge between the University, policy makers and the communities they serve.  

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Listen - The State of Poverty: Systems, Silos and Solutions

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First published: 9 October 2025