Debate contribution: Emergency Food Parcels for Children

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 27 January 2025.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

27 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Emergency Food Parcels for Children

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4759220

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thought that it was an intervention. No problem. Poverty is not just the unfair and cruel end result of capitalism but a public health emergency that hits children hardest. Locally, the rate of children growing up in relative poverty grew from 18% in 2021 to 24% in 2023, so it is clearly going in the wrong direction. We are all familiar with the child poverty statistics, but there is one clear conclusion: rising rates of child poverty are a sure sign of a state that is in rapid decline. The Stormont Executive have accepted child poverty as unfortunate but, effectively, inevitable. The de facto government response to widespread poverty has been to outsource responsibility for caring for people to food banks. Those who run and volunteer in our food banks provide practical and emotional support to thousands of families each year. Edel Diamond, manager of the South-West Food Bank in my constituency, stated:

"It is clear to us that the system is broken. While we strive to help others, and help them to maintain their dignity as much as we possibly can, the system continually works against us."

No truer words have been spoken. Most of the people who work or volunteer in our food banks do not want to be in the business. They recognise that reliance on food banks to meet people's immediate and basic needs is totally unsustainable. It is nothing more than a sticking plaster, and it is no substitute for a long-term, serious plan to end poverty for good. While we wait for that long-term plan, our social security system constantly fails the needs of families across the North. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, 75% of children in poverty have at least one parent who is working in at least one job. That busts a popular myth that work is a guaranteed way out of poverty. The state is, essentially, subsidising our low-wage economy. That is how employers get away with paying people a pittance. We cannot talk about our broken social security system without mentioning the two-child limit. A total of 16% of children in west Belfast are impacted by the two-child limit. Those children lose out on essential benefits just because they happen to have been born into a larger family. On average, affected families lose out on £3,200 per year per child, which is robbery that is being passed off as something else. Capping a child's entitlement to social security is absolutely inhumane. We do not limit a child's access to healthcare or education on the basis of the size of the family that they were born into, so why do we do it for social security? The two-child limit is a perfect example of the warped austerity logic introduced by the Tories as part of their war against the poor and upheld by a cowardly new Labour Government. It is a political choice, and the Stormont Executive's decision not to mitigate the austerity choices is also a political choice and a reminder that the Executive parties here voted for welfare reform in a grubby deal to cut taxes for corporations. Do not forget about that. Executive parties also cut the school holiday food grant and refuse to roll out universal free school meals, despite the huge public demand and need for them. Let us judge them by their actions and the Minister by his actions, rather than words in the Chamber today. As the Deputy Speaker, Mr Aiken, said, the Executive are once again being taken to court over their failure to follow through on their promise to adopt an anti-poverty strategy after nearly 20 years. What is going on? I have no doubt that the Minister will tell us that he plans to present a paper to the Executive in the coming weeks. How many children, Minister, will sit in freezing homes in the coming weeks? How many children will go to bed hungry in the coming weeks while you and your Department refuse to act? Rather than challenging income inequality and taxing the wealthy, those in power tell us that we need to abide by fiscal rules set by London that see endless brutal cuts to public services. Meanwhile, the wealth of the world's billionaires grew by £5·7 billion a day last year. Why should that money continue to line the pockets of the wealthy while hundreds of thousands of children across the North go without food in their stomach or a roof over their head? Despite what Executive parties hell-bent on implementing austerity may tell us, child poverty is not inevitable. It is time to make it history.

773 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:50 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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