NICCY Advice on draft Anti-Poverty Strategy

This is a historic opportunity to tackle child poverty in Northern Ireland, as the work on the Anti-Poverty Strategy coincides with the development of a UK Child Poverty Strategy. If both governments truly provide leadership in tackling child poverty, and work together to deliver their strategies, there is potential to achieve significant change, for the first time in many years.

There has been consistent independent analysis from NICCY, NIAO, PAC and others about the failures of Strategies aimed to tackle poverty/child poverty in NI over the past 15-20 years, and it is critical that the Executive learns from this feedback to deliver a more effective approach to tackling child poverty moving forward. Despite strong consensus from across civic society on what the structure and content of the NI Executive’s Anti-Poverty Strategy should be, it is deeply regrettable that the shape and content of the draft published in June had inexplicably moved away entirely from previous versions developed with the Co-Design Group.

The full response can be downloaded at the right-hand side of this page.