Debate contribution: Cost-of-living Increase: Impact

Debate contribution by Ms Sian Mulholland on 17 November 2025.

MLA

Ms Sian Mulholland

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

17 November 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Cost-of-living Increase: Impact

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5245797

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on the motion. I thank the Members who brought the issue to the Floor. The anti-poverty strategy consultation may be over, but poverty is not pausing. Poverty is tightening its grip on such a wide swathe of households, but it is the depth of poverty that should trouble every one of us in the Chamber. At a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) round table that we attended, Baroness Lister of Burtersett, one of the UK's leading social policy thinkers, set out with absolute clarity what an effective anti-poverty strategy must look like:

"It must work with the grain of everyday life. It has to start with the lived realities of the families who experience poverty not in abstract policy documents but in the heating that they cannot afford, the food that runs out and the impossible choices that they make week after week."

She reminded us:

"lived experience cannot be a token exercise. It has to shape the design, the delivery and the accountability of that strategy"

and:

"Without clear targets, independent monitoring and a rights-based framework that treats poverty as a breach of dignity and equality, any strategy loses legitimacy and impact."

Her message to us was powerful:

"Income matters, accountability matters and political will matters."

Do we have all three of those in the House? Unless people living in poverty can see their fingerprints on the solutions, they will not have those people's trust. That brings me to a point that the motion implicitly recognises: it is not about how many people are struggling — we know the numbers all too well; we have heard them many times in debating many other motions — but about how deep the struggle has become. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows us not only that poverty is widespread across the UK but that it is deepening. Hardship is intensifying and becoming even more entrenched in Northern Ireland. The Trussell Trust's 'Cost of Hunger and Hardship' report estimates that 200,000 people, including 62,000 children, which is roughly one in seven, face hunger and hardship. Those people are experiencing and managing the deepest and most damaging forms of hardship — severe food insecurity, destitution and hunger and hardship — that go far beyond what the headline poverty rates capture. In Northern Ireland, the persistence and depth of poverty and the poverty gap are not routinely measured. We rely entirely on absolute and relative poverty rates despite all the evidence that those headline figures no longer capture the severity of the hardship.

The draft anti-poverty strategy contains no targets or indicators, so I ask for them to be included. We cannot continue with a broad-brush approach when the evidence shows that hardship is concentrated, severe and worsening.

I come now to the UUP amendment. We welcome it and share the concerns that it raises. Rising food costs have placed significant strain on households across Northern Ireland. They have deepened food insecurity and widened health inequalities. We are concerned that the Education Authority's recent increase in the cost of school meals will only add to those pressures, particularly for families who are already struggling to make ends meet. Access to affordable food, including school meals, is essential in tackling child poverty and improving health outcomes, so we will support the amendment. It is vital that decisions by all Departments and all arm's-length bodies align with what is, as we are constantly reminded, an Executive anti-poverty strategy. Therefore, we urge the Minister of Education to review the decision, raise the eligibility threshold for free school meals and work closely with his colleague the Minister for Communities to deliver a coordinated response. The Communities Minister tends to bristle a bit when I use Scotland as a benchmark, so we will look instead at the Republic of Ireland. That jurisdiction has placed a real emphasis on measuring the depth and level of deprivation. It measures "at risk of poverty", "enforced deprivation" and "consistent poverty". Recent Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) work identifies children who are deprived even when their parents' income sits just above the poverty line. Child benefit, the working family payment and free school meals and schoolbooks have lifted 150,000 children out of income poverty and 94,000 out of consistent poverty. That is what happens when depth and deprivation are taken seriously. We need targeted interventions that shift the outcomes. Above all, we need an anti-poverty strategy that is worthy of the name, grounded in objective need, framed in a life-cycle approach —

— and shaped by lived experience. A strategy without delivery is not a strategy at all.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:58 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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