Belfast, June 2025: This Anti-Poverty Strategy document being launched for consultation raises serious questions about the Executive’s commitment to children, families and communities impacted by poverty. It has no clear priorities, budget, action plan, milestones, or accountability for its delivery. It recycles existing commitments, with no real clear link drawn to a deeply flawed description of the current drivers of poverty. There’s no evidence that lessons have been learnt from past initiatives, no serious assessment of the drivers of poverty, and no engagement with the lived experience of children, families and communities. At Save the Children NI we have to ask - how was this agreed?
The Executive could have opted for a big, bold move like introducing a child payment to lift thousands of children out of poverty. Or strengthened an existing policy like the Childcare Subsidy Scheme to help more families with the cost of childcare access work. Or it could simply have committed to bring together departments, local councils and trusts, organisations working to combat poverty, and children, families and communities experiencing poverty, to work together to address poverty. Again, we have to ask, how has a document with no measures to reach its ambition been signed off?
Right across our community - in departments, local councils, sectors - there is knowledge, expertise and passion about how to lift children out of poverty. Every day people across Northern Ireland are working hard to tackle poverty on the ground. This document hasn’t harnessed that energy, and the development of the strategy has been problematic. We know the big drivers of poverty are low pay, 2 child limit, access to services, discrimination and inequality and there is nothing in this document that gives us hope these will be addressed head-on.