Building Local Financial Inclusion Partnerships
In our 2005 report, Scaling up for Financial Inclusion, we highlighted the key role that local partnerships could play in helping to ensure that low income communities had access to affordable financial services. At that time, we argued that those 88 Local authorities which contained the most deprived communities should be given a responsibility to use Neighbourood Renewal Funding (NRF) to support financial inclusion work. In addition, we argued that it was important that banks and private sector financial services providers engage with local strategic partnerships to bring mainstream services back into low income communities.
Now that NRF has been replaced by the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, and a new Local (and Multi) Area Agreement framework has been set out for English local authorities, we are in the process of updating our proposals to provide greater assistance to local partnerships seeking to ensure that debt and financial inclusion issues are addressed. We are also examining the potential of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment to drive forwards the development of local strategies.
As part of this project we are developing:
We expect to complete this work by June 2008, and welcome the active involvement of local authorities and partners in this work.
If you are interested in participating in this project, please Contact us here