Building Financial Resilience and Local Anti-Poverty Strategies is becoming an urgent priority for councils, public bodies and community partners across the UK. In a two-person keynote at The Universal Credit Conference, now available to watch On Demand, Penny Rimmer, Senior Policy Officer at Resolve Poverty, and Izzie Salter, PhD Intern at Resolve Poverty, explored how national policy changes can be translated into practical local action.
Their session brought together policy context, frontline insight and real-world examples to show how local areas can move beyond short-term crisis response and towards coordinated, preventative approaches to poverty. Rather than treating hardship as the responsibility of one service or department, Penny and Izzie argued that poverty must be understood as a whole-system challenge.
Why Local Anti-Poverty Action Matters Now
Penny opened the session by introducing Resolve Poverty’s work as a not-for-profit organisation focused on locally and regionally led anti-poverty activity in the UK. The organisation supports councils, public bodies, private sector partners and voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations to strengthen their responses to poverty.
A central theme of the keynote was that national policy is increasingly recognising poverty as a cross-cutting issue. Poverty affects health, education, employment, wellbeing and economic participation, which means that effective responses need to be coordinated across services and sectors.
Penny highlighted several policy developments shaping the current landscape, including the Child Poverty Strategy, the Financial Inclusion Strategy, the NHS 10-Year Health Plan and devolution reforms. Taken together, these signal a stronger emphasis on prevention, early intervention and local leadership.
Building Financial Resilience and Local Anti-Poverty Strategies Through National Policy
One of the key messages from Penny’s contribution was that national ambition alone is not enough. Strategies and funding streams can create more favourable conditions, but their impact depends on how effectively local systems respond.
Local authorities and their partners are being asked to do more than manage immediate pressures. They are increasingly expected to align services, improve accountability for outcomes and coordinate activity around shared priorities. This is where local anti-poverty strategies can play a vital role.
Penny noted that Resolve Poverty’s research found growing interest in formal anti-poverty strategies among councils in England. While these strategies are not a solution on their own, they can provide the framework needed to bring together services, funding streams and partners around a common purpose.
The Crisis and Resilience Fund as an Anti-Poverty Lever
Izzie then explored the Crisis and Resilience Fund, describing it as a significant moment for local welfare provision in England. Importantly, she emphasised that the fund should not be viewed as just another short-term funding stream.
Instead, the Crisis and Resilience Fund has the potential to reshape how local systems respond to hardship over the longer term. Izzie explained that it represents the first multi-year settlement for local crisis support in over a decade, creating an opportunity for local authorities to plan more strategically, invest in systems and build preventative approaches.
Moving Beyond Reactive Emergency Support
Historically, short-term funding cycles have made it difficult for local areas to move beyond emergency response. Izzie argued that the Crisis and Resilience Fund signals a shift in intent: from reacting to crisis after it happens, towards building longer-term financial resilience.
The fund’s guidance points towards several outcomes, including more timely and needs-based crisis support, improved financial resilience, reduced repeat crises and a stronger local support landscape. This means connecting crisis payments with wider support such as housing advice, debt advice, income maximisation and community provision.
The Four Key Components of the Fund
Izzie summarised four key components of the Crisis and Resilience Fund:
- Crisis payments, with a cash-first approach where appropriate.
- Housing payments, administered by district councils for the first two years.
- Resilience services, including income maximisation, debt reduction, savings support, budgeting and assistance.
- Community coordination, focused on mapping local resources, connecting services and building clear support pathways.
The important point, Izzie stressed, is that these components should not operate in isolation. Their value lies in how they work together to support people over time.
Universal Credit, Crisis Points and Local Support
Because the keynote took place at The Universal Credit Conference, Izzie also reflected on how local crisis and resilience support interacts with Universal Credit. Even where people access national support, financial crises can still occur due to factors such as deductions, sanctions, overpayments, rent shortfalls, one-off costs, existing debts or the benefit cap.
These pressures can act as trigger points, pushing people into hardship that is difficult to escape without longer-term support. Izzie argued that local services can complement national welfare support by improving access to advice, correcting outcomes, supporting income maximisation and helping people stabilise their finances.
What Financial Resilience Looks Like in Practice
To show what this can look like on the ground, Izzie introduced Resolve Poverty’s Money Matters programme. The programme delivers benefits and debt advice directly to parents through children’s education settings, such as schools.
Delivered by accredited financial inclusion officers, Money Matters is designed to maximise the financial resources available to low-income families, particularly those who may not access traditional advice services. Since launching in June 2022, the programme has secured more than £700,000 in financial gains for families through increased benefit income, grants, utility debt relief, school uniforms and essential household items.
This example illustrated a core message from the keynote: financial resilience is not only about helping people in the moment of crisis. It is also about connecting people to the right support earlier, in familiar and trusted settings.
Learning from Bolton: A Local Anti-Poverty Strategy in Action
Penny then returned to share Resolve Poverty’s strategic partnership with Bolton Council. She explained that Bolton already had a great deal of good work taking place, but activity was fragmented and inconsistent across the borough. The goal was to create a more sustainable, coordinated approach.
Using Resolve Poverty’s framework for local anti-poverty strategies, the partnership worked to build a shared understanding of poverty in Bolton. This included bringing together data, frontline insight and community experience to shape priorities and support delivery.
A Strategy That Does Not Sit on a Shelf
Penny was clear that an effective anti-poverty strategy should be practical, adaptable and actively used. In Bolton, the strategy was designed as a live working document that can evolve as circumstances and pressures change.
The work focused on three core themes:
- Prevention and reduction, supporting residents earlier.
- Mitigation, improving support when financial pressures arise.
- Working together, building capacity and connection across organisations.
Examples included financial capability work in primary schools, attendance allowance uptake support through GP practices for older residents, strengthened advice and welfare pathways, support for carers, community recruitment and poverty awareness training.
What Local Areas Can Take from the Session
The keynote from Penny Rimmer and Izzie Salter offered a practical and timely reminder that tackling poverty requires both national commitment and local coordination. Funding streams such as the Crisis and Resilience Fund can create opportunities, but only if they are embedded into wider anti-poverty work rather than treated as separate programmes.
For local authorities and their partners, the key lessons are clear: build shared understanding, involve people with lived experience, connect crisis support with longer-term resilience services, and treat strategies as living frameworks for action.
Conclusion: Turning Policy Momentum into Local Change
Building Financial Resilience and Local Anti-Poverty Strategies means moving from fragmented responses to coordinated, preventative local systems. As Penny and Izzie showed, this work is complex, but it is also achievable when partners align around shared outcomes and keep residents’ lived experience at the centre.
For councils, public bodies and community organisations, now is the time to review how crisis support, welfare advice, debt services, housing support and community provision fit together. The Universal Credit Conference session offers valuable insight for anyone working to strengthen local anti-poverty action, and it is available to view through The Universal Credit Conference On Demand.