Leeds GATE Annual General Meeting will be held on Wednesday 3rd July at 12.00 noon. It will be in the main training room at the Leeds GATE office. Casual attendance welcome but please let us know in advance so that we can ensure catering as lunch will be provided.

From next year, another big change in the lives of many will be the practical impact of Universal Credit payments.  Gone will be the weekly or fortnightly payments of different benefits, such as ESA one week, housing benefit another and Child Benefit the next.  In comes one big monthly payment which rolls together most benefits (pretty much anything outside pensions and disability payments).  In comes the expectation to manage this money yourself as out go direct payments to landlords and others. Read more

Improving Gypsy and Traveller health and wellbeing

Next week our long awaited Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Community Health Needs Assessment (CNHA) will be released.  It has been a long process to reach the release date, not least because issues affecting the health and wellbeing of staff and community members at GATE.  We’ll be blogging more about the findings of the CHNA over the next few weeks.

We all know that just about everything about how we interact with, and organise, health and social care is in a state of change.  Public Health (that’s everything to do with the broad health of the populations rather than individuals in their patient journey) is now part of the council.  Health and Social care services are going to become ‘integrated’; and even the way that we speak to our own doctors (ie by email, text, or even in groups) is going to change in the future.

So, how are all these changes going to impact on what we already know, that the health outcomes for Gypsy and Traveller people are poor?  Indeed, can these changes impact on the health of Gypsies and Travellers?  We certainly hope so.  Read more

As part of our objective ‘improving education, employment and financial inclusion’ Leeds GATE have been working with the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, ITMB, to asses the likely impact of welfare benefit changes.  We are pleased to release a joint report about the upcoming Universal Credit benefit change and the impact this might have on the Gypsy and Traveller community.  Please find it here.

GATE and ITMB previously noted their concerns over the Government’s Equality Impact Assessment of this legislation, particularly its simplistic comparison of ‘white’ with ‘non white’ groups.  Both organisations did not feel that this approach fully recognise the differences within this ‘non white’ group and therefore the realities of many marginalised groups. Read more