Glasgow Community Planning Partnership brings together public agencies, the third sector, and the private sector, to work to improve the city, its services, and the lives of people who live and work here.
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 requires the Partnership to publish a Local Outcomes Improvement Plan that sets out our shared priorities for the city, where we plan to make improvements, and over time show that we have made these improvements. In Glasgow, this document is split into two parts:
A Community Plan – which sets a strategic direction, defining focus and priority areas
A Community Action Plan – which lays out planned actions to deliver on the Community Plan
While the Community Plan is intended to be a ten-year plan, running from its publication in October 2017, the initial Action Plan covered a two-year period from March 2018 – 2020. An annual report on the progress of the Action Plan was published in March 2019, a year into its term, and is available to read on the GCPP website here.
A year on from that report, a new Action Plan was due to be created for the period 2020 – 2022, as the existing Plan had reached the end of its term. However, as March 2020 rolled around, there was a more pressing concern that needed to be addressed.
The Coronavirus pandemic had an enormous impact on the work of the Partnership. While the Council and partners were trying to adapt to an entirely new working environment, with workers sent home from the office and a huge surge in the need for devices to facilitate this, Glasgow’s communities were faced with entirely unprecedented challenges.
COVID-19 affected all of us as individuals, but its impact on communities was amplified due to the nature of the necessary measures which were put in place to contain its spread. Lockdowns and social distancing meant that the community hubs and local spaces that people relied on were no longer able to open. Those with poor digital skills were left further behind, as technology became increasingly relied on for work and socialising. With the introduction of schemes such as furlough and self-isolation, the sudden shift to not leaving your home dramatically worsened many people’s mental health. It affected access to healthcare; schools were closed; entire sectors of the economy became inactive – the list goes on.
It was clear an urgent response was required. From March onwards the immediate focus of this response was crisis management, but as we emerged from the lockdown phase of the pandemic the focus shifted to medium and long-term impacts. Rather than working on a revised Community Action Plan, the GCPP diverted its resources into the newly created Social Recovery Taskforce (SRT), which formed one branch of the Council’s Renewal and Recovery Programme.
The Social Recovery Taskforce was established in July 2020, with the key aim of addressing the societal and equality impacts of the pandemic, and took over the Action Plan’s role of providing direction to the work of its member bodies. The Taskforce was split into workstreams, with each focused on a specific issue or community which had been disproportionately impacted by Covid, and much of the work covered in this update stems from these workstreams.
If you wish to read more detail regarding the creation and structure of the Social Recovery Taskforce, the full Terms of Reference are available here.
Having now run for 18 months, the SRT is holding its final meeting in January 2022 in which it will be handing over to the GCPP Strategic Partnership. As the SRT comes to a close, now is time to look back to the Community Action Plan – however it would be remiss to ignore all that has been achieved and all that has changed in the two years since the previous plan ended.
In this update we aim to share with you the story of what the city partners have done to help the city since you last heard from us. The stories featured across the site offer a window into the body of work undertaken in response to COVID, punctuated by data and real-life examples where available. We hope you enjoy learning more about all we accomplished.
Now though is time to look toward the future – to learn about our next steps, and how we can use the work discussed here to shape our forward direction, visit Looking Ahead.