15-05-2025
Anti-poverty strategy to be signed off after 18 years
Stormont ministers are expected to agree the Northern Ireland Executive's first-ever draft strategy to tackle poverty later on Thursday, BBC News NI understands.
In March, Stormont's Executive Committee was found in breach of its legal obligation to adopt the strategy by a court ruling.
The anti-poverty strategy was first committed to 18 years ago with the aim of reducing social exclusion and deprivation.
Communities Minister Gordon Lyons submitted a draft paper to ministers for consideration about six weeks ago.
The minister previously described the document as a "realistic" but long-term plan to tackle poverty.
It must be signed off by ministers before it can go out for public consultation.
It will then return to the executive for any final changes to be considered before Stormont departments can begin to implement it.
Recent figures from the Department for Communities (DfC) suggest about 22% of children in Northern Ireland are growing up in poverty.
The figures also indicate that about 23% of children are in relative poverty and about 20% are in absolute poverty.
The anti-poverty strategy is a requirement inserted into the Northern Ireland Act, following the St Andrews Agreement in 2006.
There have been multiple court orders and legal challenges made as no strategy has ever been implemented in Northern Ireland.
In January, judgment was reserved in a recent legal challenge brought against Stormont for "failing to adopt" an anti-poverty strategy for Northern Ireland.
Two months later at the High Court in Belfast, Stormont's Executive Committee was found in breach of its legal obligation to adopt a strategy.
Trása Canavan from Barnados and a member of the Anti-Poverty Strategy Group said: "Unfortunately we haven't had any sight of this document."
"We haven't had any engagement with, either as individual organisations or as the anti-poverty strategy group, the minister or his officials on the development of the draft strategy," she told BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme.
"You know this group did a huge amount of work throughout the course of the 2021, 2022 and subsequent years to input into a co-design process and then develop our own paper recommendations, which was nearly 100 pages.
"So there is a huge amount of work that has gone on and that we shared with the department.
"We really hoped that would have informed the draft but I can't tell you what's in it because we haven't been engaged in the process of the development of this paper."
There are two main measurements of low income used by the government, absolute poverty and relative poverty.
Income is counted as the money a household has to spend after housing costs are taken into account.
Absolute poverty measures how many people this year cannot afford a set standard of living.
The Department for Work and Pensions at Westminster currently defines it based on the living standard an average income could buy in the year ending in March 2011.
If your income is 40% below this, after adjusting for rising prices since then, you are classed as living in absolute poverty.
Relative poverty is the number of people whose income is 40% below the average income today.
An individual is considered to be in relative poverty if they are living in a household with an income below 60% of the typical UK income.
This is a measure of whether those in the lowest income households are keeping pace with the growth of incomes in the population as a whole.
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