Debate contribution: Emergency Food Parcels for Children

Debate contribution by Ms Kellie Armstrong on 27 January 2025.

MLA

Ms Kellie Armstrong

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 4759252

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Principal Deputy Speaker. I thank everyone who has spoken on the motion today. Alliance proposed the motion because this is one of the key issues affecting society today. If we can create a solution — if we can lift children out of the social disadvantage of poverty — we can change society in Northern Ireland. I pay tribute to all the food bank providers across Northern Ireland who help people when they are at their most vulnerable and most in need. Thanks, too, to all the people across Northern Ireland who very kindly donate to those food banks. However, I hate the fact that we have food banks in Northern Ireland. We have people who have to depend on those food banks in order to feed their children. As others have said, 190,000 children are living in poverty. Many of those children are eating food that is donated. If everything were wonderful and working in our government, children would not have to depend on donated food in order to eat. It is very difficult for me to understand exactly what it is like for someone who is living in such poverty that they have to cut the mould off bread to make their child's sandwiches. I heard that this morning from a parent at the round table that my colleague Sian arranged. Imagine what that is like for the child. Imagine what it is like for a child to see their parent doing that. The child might feel guilty for having a birthday, or at Christmas, because they know that getting a present is going to cost their family money and take away from the family household income. Some children are embarrassed to tell their mum or dad about school trips because they know that it is going to be extraordinarily difficult for the family to be able to afford that amount of money.

People want dignity, stability and fairness, and if we are to be fair to all our children in Northern Ireland, we have to give them a place to live that is safe and enough food that they can eat well, grow well and be healthy. We do not do that at the moment. We talk about the best start in life. Are we giving our children in Northern Ireland the best start in life?

Not all of this falls to the Department for Communities and Minister Gordon Lyons. It falls to a lot of different Departments, and that is why it is so important to ensure that all the Executive sign up to the anti-poverty strategy — the Minister talked about introducing that in February — and commit to meeting targets and delivering on timescales. Mr Bradley was very good at summarising what a lot of other Members said in the debate, which saves me from doing it. He said that those targets and timescales are key. The last strategy failed because there were no targets or timescales. It may not be within the lifetime of this mandate, but, certainly within the next mandate, we should be seeing differences for people. To be honest, that will take a long time to come forward, and it makes me very sad to see that. Some actions have already been introduced. For example, the Minister has confirmed that the welfare mitigations that are currently in place will continue for a period of years. I believe that, as part of the strategy, the two-child limit is an important matter that must be addressed with DWP. When we cost out the savings that could be made by removing that two-child limit, we might consider it to be beneficial for Northern Ireland and consider adding it to the welfare mitigations going forward. The Minister talked about the scourge of poverty and its long-term consequences. This morning, we heard from parents who talked about the difficulty of seeing that cyclical poverty happening. They struggle so much with the amount of income that they have in their house and with feeding their children that their children have mental stress. Having seen their family struggle so much, those children have real difficulties with money as they move to adulthood. The anti-poverty strategy must include the three pillars that the Minister talked about and that my colleague Sian Mulholland mentioned. The Minister talked about the strategy having a lifespan of over 10 years. Those 10 years need to see actions, and I reiterate that we need targets and timescales to make sure that that is appropriate. Those targets and time frames are some of the things that I would love to see in the public consultation that is mentioned in the amendment tabled by the DUP, which Alliance will support. For us to make sure that the Department for Work and Pensions has enough information about the impact that its two-child limit is having in Northern Ireland, we need to take to it information on and evidence of the effect of poverty on children. Wonderful reports have come through — not wonderful; they are quite distressing to read — from the Trussell Trust, the Public Accounts Committee and the Northern Ireland Audit Office. Children should not think it normal that they have to go to a food bank. I have to say that, in my constituency, my office is one of the offices that distributes most of the food vouchers. When we have people in the office, we treat them with dignity. We know that they are very nervous, and we try to help them by showing as much respect as we can. However, we know that their being there is the start of or maybe midway through a journey and that they are living in absolute destitution. As was mentioned today, they are doing that because of child support debt and paramilitary and illegal lending. The percentages that paramilitaries are whopping on to people are unbelievable. People are repaying benefits loans, budgeting loans and things like that. The amount that they have to pay out of their benefits to make up the difference between housing benefit and rent is incredible. They are then hit with the cost of school trips, school uniforms, schools constantly asking for a pound for this and 50p for that and so on. It is never-ending. We need to review exactly how much parents are having to spend. Also, walk into a supermarket and look at how much it costs to buy things specifically for children, such as nappies, baby formula, wipes, toys and all of that.

I certainly will.

I agree absolutely with my colleague Sian. The difficulty in rural areas is that people who do not have access to a local supermarket often go to a local garage that happens to have a shop attached to it, and the prices there are maybe two or three times higher than those in a large supermarket. All that is all while we have children coming through our education system and trying to be children.

Is it fair for them? Are they being treated with dignity? Do they have stability? I do not think so. I am really delighted that, today, we are speaking with one voice in the House and are all in agreement that an anti-poverty strategy is needed. We all want to see it introduced as soon as possible. We want it to be the right strategy, and we want to make sure that it contains time frames and targets. It needs to be published quickly, however, and we need to have buy-in from the entire Executive. The Alliance Party is on the Executive with other parties, and we say to all our Executive colleagues, "We need buy-in for this". We also need accountability and to make sure that a mechanism is in place to enable us to check how the strategy is working. Lots of parents out there are very concerned about the impact of poverty on their children. Hopefully, they will have an opportunity, through the public consultation, to look at what is being proposed and to have their say on what they think of the proposals. After all, they are the people who have to manage budgets, who have to see their children going without and who have to manage the expectations of those children in a household that is living in poverty. It is very sad that we cannot copy what Scotland has done. Its approach, especially for children with disabilities, is much better than ours. That is because ours is framed on a Budget that is extraordinarily difficult. Although I welcome the Minister's announcement about the anti-poverty strategy, my concern is that it will not come into being until after the Budget for the next financial year has been set. What actions will we therefore see coming out of it? Will it be another year before anything happens? This debate comes at a difficult and emotional time, because it is our children in Northern Ireland who are suffering. I ask everyone to support our motion and the amendment so that we can make the lives of children better.

1,516 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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