Ms Anna Shakespeare:

I will add to what Ms Rogers said. The use of tools such as the deprivation index, for example, across government in the context of its funding and programmes is a real opportunity for it to engage in a much more targeted approach to combating disadvantage and poverty. One recent example is that of a Department we had never worked with before, namely, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. We worked with it around the allocation of its community climate action programme funding and built in deprivation scores into how that funding was allocated for the development of communities. It is about building the thinking across government that resources are used in a way that targets disadvantage. That would certainly be our experience and is our recommendation to the committee.