Debate contribution: Emergency Food Parcels for Children

Debate contribution by Ms Sian Mulholland on 27 January 2025.

MLA

Ms Sian Mulholland

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

27 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Emergency Food Parcels for Children

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4758798

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move:

I rise not out of duty but out of a profound sense of sadness and quite a lot of anger that, in 2025, children in Northern Ireland still rely on food banks to survive; that 62,000 children face hunger in Northern Ireland; that the number of emergency food parcels distributed to children has increased by 90% in the past five years; and that we continue to accept that as inevitable, with child poverty still not being treated as an outright priority by today's Department for Communities or any previous one. What frightens me more is that individuals mask their poverty, making the true scale of need almost impossible to measure. Those people remain on the periphery, ashamed to seek help, and fall deeper into poverty as a result. Last week, I had the privilege — I use that word cautiously — to visit the food bank in Ballycastle. The work that Ashley and her team do there is nothing short of heroic — saving lives; providing warmth and sustenance; signposting people to vital services — and is done without fanfare and often without the resources that they so desperately need and risking people avoiding them in the street lest anyone, God forbid, would know that they avail themselves of the food bank's services. The food bank in Lisburn has distributed 461 tons of food, which equates to almost 1·1 million meals. It has fed one in six children in Lisburn and supported one in 10 single-parent families since its opening in 2013. Foyle Foodbank has seen a 161% increase in demand, with 9,000 people, including 4,000 children, having been given household essentials in the past year. Let me be clear: it is shameful that those places even need to exist in our society. I walked in there not happy, smiling and delighted to see everybody but with a profound and conflicted sense of shame and anger that the political system of which I am part has allowed that to happen. We in the Chamber should not offer congratulations to food banks on their existence. We need to offer solutions to end their necessity. As someone at our round-table discussion this morning told me, food banks used to be an emergency lifeline but are now part of everyday life. The people of Ballycastle and from communities across Northern Ireland are asking not for handouts but for dignity, stability and fairness. They are asking for change, and it is our duty to provide it. Why is a child in Ballycastle more likely to visit a food bank than a child who lives in Scotland, just 12 miles away across the North Channel? Is it because parents in Ballycastle work less hard or care less about their children? Of course not. It is because Scotland's leaders made a political choice to tackle child poverty head-on. The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 introduced legally binding targets to reduce child poverty. Policies such as the Scottish child payment and universal free school meals directly lift children out of poverty. Those were not just policies but commitments backed by funding and measurable outcomes. In Northern Ireland, we have made the opposite choice: to delay, to deflect and to deny the scale of the crisis. Scotland's child payment alone has reduced child poverty by five percentage points. The comparison with Scotland demonstrates that political will backed by ambitious targets can make a tangible difference. Since 2006, when the anti-poverty strategy was first promised, we seem to have done nothing but tumble down a road of delay. In Northern Ireland, there are children relying on food banks who were not even born when the commitment was made for the first anti-poverty strategy. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report could not have been clearer when it stated that the child poverty strategy that we had from 2016 to 2022 was characterised by failure: a failure to monitor outcomes, to ring-fence funding, to prioritise prevention and to utilise the Children's Services Co-Operation Act (Northern Ireland) 2015. It was a failure to deliver.

When we took action through temporary cost-of-living payments, such as the £301 payment in spring 2023, food bank usage temporarily fell by 17%, but demand rebounded within weeks. That highlights the inadequacy of short-term fixes in addressing long-term issues.

Whilst I welcome the extension of the welfare mitigations to March 2028, those measures alone are insufficient to protect vulnerable families. The full impact of the two-child limit is yet to unfold, as it impacts only on children born after 2017. If our policies fail to adapt, the benefits of welfare mitigation will erode well before 2028. Implementing the recommendations of Les Allamby's independent review on welfare mitigations is not optional; it is essential to strengthening protections and preventing further poverty. The cost of long-term inaction is staggering. Beyond the devastating impact on children and families, it costs the Executive up to £1 billion annually. That is an unsustainable financial burden in today's economic climate, particularly when effective preventative measures could dramatically reduce those costs over time. The root causes of food poverty cannot be ignored. Inadequate social security policies, such as the aforementioned two-child limit, disproportionately affect larger families and drive thousands into poverty. The five-week wait forces people to go to illegal moneylenders. During our round-table, I heard from one organisation about a young mother who had her windows put in last week because she could not afford to pay the interest on a loan that she had received from a paramilitary lender. She is the second mother that that organisation has dealt with in recent months. Cuts and freezes to social security since 2010, low wages, insecure work, a lack of social housing and inadequate childcare provision all further trap families in a cycle of poverty. We know that this is not an easy problem to fix, but the solutions are there. Low wages and insecure work also exacerbate food poverty. One in four food bank users in Northern Ireland come from working households, and, while it is easy to have the view, "People just need to get a job; they are just on benefits, using food banks", the reality is that paid work is no longer a guaranteed route out of poverty. This morning, Rebecca told me that the more she worked, the worse off she was. Another cause of poverty is political instability and the ability of parties to collapse the very institutions that should be working to protect our most vulnerable. We have to reform our institutions to ensure that they remain functional and continue to deliver. As I said, this morning I met parents who are food bank users and representatives of organisations that have been delivering on the ground. I want to hold space in the Chamber for their words, because it is our duty not just to parrot statistics and high-level policy positions but to amplify the voices of those who rely on the House to represent their needs. Comments included that we need to change the conversation; have a rights-based, child-centred approach; and address the right to have food and the right not to be hungry. One person said:

"Gas is a luxury. 'Eating or heating' isn't a sound bite; it's my reality. My reality is that I went without food so my kids could eat. The impact can't be hidden from my children. They don't want to have their own children, in case they have to live in poverty like they did".

Another said:

"My daughter now has OCD and other mental health issues in terms of spending money or having money".

Another said:

"I have to explain to a four-year-old that mummy just doesn't have the money for what she wants".

Another said:

"The more I worked, the worse off I was".

Another said:

"It's not just about the financial poverty; it's about the courage I have to have to have to even walk in and ask for help".

Those who work in some of the organisations say that there is only so much that they can do. They say, "The poor keep getting poorer", "The system is broken", "Universal credit isn't working" and:

"Minimum wage isn't the living wage".

They also say:

"Food banks used to be that emergency lifeline and now they're part of everyday life".

And:

"This is more than just about food; it is about every single element of my daily life".

It goes on. We are at a tipping point. Without immediate action, children in Northern Ireland will continue to suffer: some may even lose their lives as a result of our collective failures. It is not governance; it is negligence. We must all act with urgency and purpose to tackle child poverty. That begins with publishing and implementing a robust anti-poverty strategy, which we are due. That strategy will have to have measurable targets and ring-fenced funding, otherwise it will be simply another strategy. We have to lobby Westminster to reform the welfare system by removing the two-child limit and introducing an essentials guarantee for universal credit to ensure that it meets even the most basic living costs. Affordable childcare must be delivered so that parents can access secure and well-paid jobs. We need to tackle in-work poverty by raising wages and improving job security. Political reform is equally necessary to ensure that our institutions function effectively and deliver services. By fully implementing Les Allamby's recommendations on welfare mitigations, collaborating with community organisations and setting ambitious, legally binding targets like those in Scotland, we can begin to create a society in which every child has a fair chance to live. I conclude where I began. Ashley at Ballycastle Foodbank shared with me a simple but profound reflection:

"Our users want empathy, not sympathy, and structural solutions that provide a hand up, not a handout."

Empathy, solutions and a hand up are the three pillars on which we must rebuild our approach to tackling child poverty to ensure that children and families can break free from the cycle of hardship.

1,672 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:46 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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