19 years later, Stormont's new poverty plan falls flat
"This draft strategy is riddled with bureaucratic platitudes, light on ambition, and wholly lacking in political courage."
James is Belfast Live's dedicated Political Reporter covering news and politics across Northern Ireland.
After almost two decades of waiting, Northern Ireland’s draft Anti-Poverty Strategy has finally seen the light of day. But what should have been a landmark moment in the fight against poverty feels instead like a staggering missed opportunity and an exercise in paper-pushing that offers neither urgency nor hope.
The document, published by the Department for Communities and endorsed by the Executive, stretches to 32 pages. But behind the headings and the vague aspirations are gaping holes. It has no budget, no performance indicators, no tangible targets, and no clear plan for how the promises made will actually be delivered. In fact, it has more in common with a GCSE group project than a serious response to the grinding hardship experienced by over 330,000 people in Northern Ireland.
It’s easy to become numb to numbers. But poverty here isn’t abstract. It means children going to school hungry. Parents juggling two or three insecure jobs and still not having enough money to cover their rent. Grandparents skipping meals so they can heat their homes. The cumulative effect is devastating on health, on education, on life expectancy, and on the very social fabric of our communities.
And yet, the strategy reads as if it were drafted in a vacuum. Experts and charities invited to help shape it say their contributions were largely ignored. Those with lived experience of poverty, the very people this document is meant to serve, appear to have been treated more as box-ticking exercises than as partners in meaningful co-design.
It is notable that on Thursday, the Anti-Poverty Strategy Group, a collective of 21 charities committed to working constructively with the government to tackle poverty across Northern Ireland, unanimously rejected the draft document, stating that it is "no fit for purpose."
As Peter Bryson of Save the Children NI put it, the strategy “recycles existing commitments” and draws no “real clear link” to the actual drivers of poverty. Nor does it show signs that past failures have been learned from. There is no robust analysis of low pay, insecure work, inadequate housing, or the two-child limit on benefits, all of which we know are key forces keeping people trapped in poverty.
Perhaps most damning of all, the strategy makes no reference to bold policy moves that could genuinely shift the dial such as a targeted child payment scheme or a strengthened childcare subsidy to help parents access work. These are cost-effective measures with proven results in other parts of the UK.
Instead, we get a document that feels like it was written by committee, for a committee. It is riddled with bureaucratic platitudes, light on ambition, and wholly lacking in political courage. Gerry Carroll rightly called it “an insult” to campaigners, to working-class communities, and to the very notion of good governance.
It’s tempting to attribute all of this to dysfunction at Stormont, and there’s some truth in that. The Executive’s track record on anti-poverty measures has been shameful. It took a court ruling to even force this strategy into existence. But the rot runs deeper than simple inertia. There is a failure of political will, of moral clarity. Poverty is too often seen as someone else’s problem and something that happens “over there” in social housing estates or to “other people” who have made poor choices. But that’s a lie. Poverty is systemic, and it touches every corner of society. The cost of inaction which is estimated at £1 billion annually just from child poverty alone, affects us all.
Communities Minister Gordon Lyons insists this is a “genuine attempt” at consultation, and that more details will follow in future action plans. But how can the public trust that promise when this first draft is so staggeringly unfit for purpose?
Ursula O’Hare of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was right when she said that this strategy may have finally got the Executive out of the starting blocks, but it is nowhere near the summit of what’s needed. A real anti-poverty strategy must be a living, breathing mission to eliminate deprivation, not a glossy pamphlet with vague ambitions and no map.
There is still time to salvage this. Following the consultation, the Executive must go back to the drawing board, this time in genuine partnership with the people who understand poverty best. That means setting measurable targets, costing interventions properly, and making tough political decisions to redistribute power and resources.
The Executive must now decide whether it wants to govern by platitude or by principle. Only one of those will actually put food on the table.
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