Debate contribution: Cost-of-living Increase: Impact

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 17 November 2025.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

17 November 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Cost-of-living Increase: Impact

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5245870

Read the official Assembly record

Text

As other Members have indicated, the cost-of-living crisis does not make as many headlines these days, but it is still very much with us. Just because prices are not rising by as much as they were maybe two or three years ago, it does not mean that they are not rising or that they have come down. That is felt most acutely by working-class communities and families struggling to feed their children, especially now that the cost of school meals has been hiked. It is felt by low-paid and minimum-wage workers who are denied the bare minimum of pay increases and by unpaid carers, one in four of whom lives in poverty, who save the Executive £16 million per day in care costs. One in three children in my constituency of West Belfast, disgracefully, lives in poverty, and the two-child benefit cap is a key reason for that shameful statistic. I hope that the Chancellor does the right thing and scraps that cruel and nonsensical policy in the upcoming Budget. However, it is hard to remember the last time that the Labour Government made any decision that benefited rather than hurt working-class communities. I am unclear from the answer that the Minister for Communities gave to my question earlier what his plan of action or intention is. One in five households here has not been able to afford heat or power at least once in the past two years. That is 20% of the population living in misery in cold, dark homes. Since 2019, the number of people using food banks here has increased by 93%. That is a shameful statistic and an indictment of the powerful parties here and at Westminster, who are content to let the rich get richer while the rest of us are condemned to a life of poverty. Make no mistake about it: failure to tackle the cost of living is a political choice. The spiralling cost of living is a crisis for some people, but it is a bonanza for others. Maybe it is best to call it a "record profiteering crisis".

For example, the 500 richest people in the world have net worth of more than £8 trillion. Those are the people — billionaires and trillionaires — who are destroying our climate and exploiting workers while our Governments cosy up to them. There is more than enough wealth in our society, but it is in the wrong hands.

Locally, the Executive could do plenty of things to reduce costs for people who are struggling to get by. In the past, families living in the North were protected from the harshest impacts of poverty by relatively low housing costs, but, since COVID, housing costs have risen through the roof. Rents here are rising faster than anywhere in Britain, including London. Our wages are stagnating, and workers in the public sector have seen their wages fall in real terms. The poorest quarter of tenants living in the lowest-quality housing in Belfast spend 50% of their monthly income on rent: a huge figure. Private rents continue to rise while inflation soars and wages stagnate. Our poverty levels will skyrocket. It is entirely within the Executive's remit to introduce rent controls to stop landlords from rent gouging and exploiting their tenants, but the Minister refuses to act. He continues to parrot landlord propaganda. The state subsidises private landlords to the tune of £300 million each year in the form of housing benefits and universal credit housing costs, but we do not hear a lot about those massive handouts; we focus only on so-called benefit scroungers. Look at unpaid carers. According to economic analysis by Trussell, as others have said, protecting people from hunger and hardship would benefit the economy and public finances by over £2 billion each year, as well as delivering an additional £360 million of savings in public service costs. Tackling poverty makes economic sense, but, more important, it is the correct moral and political choice. Poverty is cruel, but it also costs money and costs lives. Tackling poverty requires a strong, ambitious anti-poverty strategy with measurable, time-bound targets. It should be a fully funded strategy that puts money in people's pockets. Instead, we have an unresourced strategy that features reheated actions, strategies that were already in development and next to no concrete actions by the Minister to increase people's income in the face of an unending cost-of-living crisis. It is an insult to the expert panel whose work the Minister binned and ignored. It is a slap in the face of the working-class communities that have been destroyed by poverty and deprivation under the Executive and on the Minister's watch. He should go back to the drawing board, listen to the experts, including experts by experience, and implement a proper anti-poverty strategy and fuel poverty strategy.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:01 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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