People Deserve an Anti-Poverty Strategy that Works for Them
Northern Ireland has waited a long time for an Anti-Poverty Strategy. Indeed, it has been almost 20 years since the requirement for the Executive to produce a strategy was inserted into the Northern Ireland Act by the St. Andrews Agreement in 2006.1
While a long time coming, the strategy was much anticipated as it represented a potentially once-in-a-generation opportunity for the Executive to transform political attitudes and garner public buy-in, to create a key driver of change to reorient and focus their policy approach on a programme of prevention and eradication of poverty in Northern Ireland. To deliver and share in the whole societal benefits that would come with successful implementation.
Moreso, it represented a potentially once-in-a-generation opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland who are suffering the impacts of poverty to get the strategic and targeted support they and their families needed to escape poverty forever.
Unfortunately, this strategy will not deliver on either of those opportunities.
The strategy sets no measurable targets or new actions, instead relying on pre-existing commitments made in other strategies but offering no additional resourcing or strategic actions to assist or support their delivery. We believe the strategy should be reshaped to ensure alignment with the objectives of the Programme for Government and other existing strategies that seek to tackle poverty, including the development of cross-departmental time-bound and measurable actions to address the root causes of poverty.
It too often relies on out-of-date data and evidence, particularly in the sphere of housing. This leads to a concerning underappreciation of the relationship between housing and poverty, particularly in the post-pandemic housing environment, resulting in a lack of strategic housing-related commitments and a misidentification of appropriate indicators. This could be improved by carrying out an additional literature review and data gathering exercise that considers new and up-to-date data. The focus should be specifically on research and data from the post-pandemic period, where possible
Potential future challenges are not adequately considered, which will make it difficult for the strategy to pre-empt and proactively adapt to emerging challenges. One example of this is the Just Transition, which has the potential to close or widen social inequalities and reduce or entrench poverty depending on the success of its implementation, is not mentioned at all. The strategy must be positioned so that it can adapt to emerging challenges through a strategic and ongoing horizon scanning exercise, so that it can adapt and respond to future challenges that will impact poverty in Northern Ireland.
The language of the strategy is equally unambitious. Poverty is a problem that can be solved, but the strategy does not present this impression. The choice of language conveys that poverty is unavoidable and should be managed or minimised rather than prevented or eradicated. Further, the Exiting Poverty pillar read in its entirety appears to rely almost exclusively on the idea that employment will pull people out of poverty, despite a swathe of evidence to the contrary, and displays little to no regard for the inequalities which can impact the jobs people can access, or to addressing the rapidly increasing and widespread cost of living.
The pillars specifically, are oversimplistic and do not adequately capture the interconnected relationship between key policy areas such as housing, health and education which each have a causal and cyclical relationship with poverty. This damages the strategy’s ability to develop holistic approaches that target the root causes of poverty.
While fully cognisant of the economic challenges facing the Executive, the strategy represented an opportunity to agree the key strategic priorities in the context of eliminating poverty, commit to addressing those priorities in an Executive-owned strategy, and foster agreement on ringfenced resourcing on priorities for future budget allocations. Unfortunately, any commitment to resourcing is absent from the strategy.
While the draft strategy in its current is extremely disappointing, we have chosen to engage in the hope that the input of the Community and Voluntary sector can be influential in amending the strategy so that it may be able to fulfil the promise of the opportunity that it could be. The people who use our services and who we advocate for on a daily basis need and deserve an effective Anti-Poverty Strategy that can and will make a tangible, positive difference in their lives.
You can read our full response and Executive Summary below.
For more information on our response, please contact our Policy Lead, Stephen Morrison at [email protected]