Debate contribution: Committee for Communities: Report on Engagement with Local Government on the Draft Anti-poverty Strategy

Debate contribution by Mr Colm Gildernew on 26 May 2026.

MLA: Mr Colm Gildernew
Party at the time: Sinn Féin
Date: 26 May 2026
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Committee Business
Heading: Committee for Communities: Report on Engagement with Local Government on the Draft Anti-poverty Strategy
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5582517

Text

Since the formation of our Committee, members have maintained a strong and continuing interest in the development of the anti-poverty strategy. We recognise that poverty is one of the most serious and persistent challenges facing communities across the North. It affects children, women, older people, disabled people, carers, workers, families, rural households and urban communities. It is also a challenge that does not sit neatly within the remit of one Department. Poverty is shaped by income, employment, housing costs, childcare costs, transport costs, energy costs, educational opportunity, health inequalities and access to advice and support. Although the Department for Communities leads on the strategy, the Committee believes that the final anti-poverty strategy must genuinely be a whole-of-government strategy and a whole-of-society strategy. The Committee's message is straightforward: local government is already part of the anti-poverty response, and the final strategy must now make it part of the anti-poverty system. The Committee decided to engage directly with all 11 councils because local government is already delivering services in the heart of our communities and with direct experience of the lived reality of poverty. Councils are not distant from the impact of poverty; they see it at first hand. They see it through advice services, fuel support, food insecurity, social supermarkets, employability programmes, community planning partnerships, hardship schemes, and the community and voluntary organisations that they support. At a dedicated meeting on 5 March 2026, the Committee for Communities heard evidence from representatives of all 11 councils. The evidence was powerful, practical and, at times, stark. One of the strongest messages that we heard was that local government is often the glue that holds local interventions together. Councils convene partners. They know their communities. They know where need is hidden, and they know which organisations are trusted by local people. They know that, in one place, the urgent need may be debt advice; in another, it may be transport; and in another, it may be help with school uniforms, heating oil or food. However, we also heard that councils can end up leading anti-poverty work by default, without the authority, the formal mandate or the resources to do so properly. That is not sustainable. If the Executive want councils to help deliver the strategy, that role must be defined, resourced and respected. The first issue, therefore, is not whether local government has a role; it already has one. The question is whether that role will be formally recognised, properly resourced and built into the delivery strategy of the architecture of the final strategy. Therefore, we recommend giving local government a defined role. The Department should explicitly define the strategic and operational role of local councils in the anti-poverty strategy. The Committee further recommends that community planning partnerships (CPPs) should be formally designated as the primary local delivery vehicles for the strategy. CPPs already bring together councils, statutory bodies, health, housing, and the community and voluntary sector. They are already in place. The task now is to give them the necessary mandate, accountability and shared outcomes to make the delivery real. Recommendation 2 is about moving away from short-term funding to sustained prevention. Defining the roles of councils is only one part of the answer. The second issue is whether the organisations expected to deliver anti-poverty work have the stability to do so. Therefore, our second recommendation concerns funding. The Committee heard repeatedly that the current system too often forces councils and community organisations into a cycle of firefighting. Short-term, competitive, late-year funding pots create uncertainty, inefficiency and, in some cases, the loss of highly skilled staff. That is particularly damaging for community advice services, wraparound support services and front-line organisations that deal with people in crisis. The Committee therefore recommends that the Executive align the anti-poverty strategy with a ring-fenced, multi-year funding settlement. No strategy can be transformative if the organisations expected to deliver it are left living hand to mouth from one financial year to the next. Recommendation 3 is about making poverty reduction a test across government. Funding individual programmes will not be enough if wider public policy continues to create or deepen poverty. That brings me to the need for poverty reduction to become a test right across government. The third recommendation is for the introduction of mandatory, anti-poverty impact assessments across government. Members heard that too many policies are made without sufficiently exploring whether they will reduce poverty, worsen poverty or simply move the pressure from one part of the system to another. The Committee believes that, similar to rural proofing, all new public policies, structural investments and budgetary decisions across Departments should be rigorously assessed for their impact on poverty before they proceed. If the anti-poverty strategy is to mean anything in practice, poverty reduction must become a test applied across housing, health, education, transport, infrastructure, childcare, skills and economic policy. Recommendation 4 is about using data to target help before crisis point. If we are serious about prevention, we need to know where need is emerging before households reach crisis point. Our fourth recommendation is for the establishment of a cross-departmental data-sharing framework. We heard a very simple point directly from local representatives, which is that people do not know what they do not know. Councils may know that need exists, but they are often prevented from identifying precisely where it is and who is most at risk. Without appropriate, secure and GDPR-compliant data-sharing, interventions are less targeted and less effective. Councils told us that data on health, housing, education, justice and benefits, as well as local knowledge, must be brought together more effectively and cohesively so that support can be proactive rather than reactive. That is not about data for its own sake; it is about getting the right help to the right people earlier and before problems become crises. Recommendation 5 is about tackling the structural causes of poverty. Better data and targeting absolutely matter, but they must sit within a wider shift from crisis response to structural prevention. The fifth recommendation is that the final strategy must prioritise structural drivers and prevention. Emergency support is necessary, but it is not enough. Food parcels, fuel vouchers and hardship payments can provide immediate relief but, by themselves, do not provide a route out of poverty. The strategy must, therefore, include measurable and time-bound actions on the structural drivers of poverty. That means a coordinated approach to increasing social and affordable housing supply; robust interventions in the private rented sector; progression of a fully funded regional childcare strategy; and dedicated actions on rural poverty, including a specific, funded focus on protecting and expanding rural and community transport networks. The issue of transport came through strongly in the evidence that we received, especially from rural councils. Poor transport limits access to work, education, health services and advice. The Committee is clear that the strategy must move beyond managing the symptoms of poverty and begin to tackle the conditions that keep people trapped in poverty. When it comes to embedding lived experience, the Committee was clear that policy must not be designed around people without being shaped by people. Our final recommendation is that lived experience must be embedded permanently in the governance, monitoring and evaluation of the anti-poverty strategy. Co-design cannot mean a one-off consultation. The Committee welcomes its engagement with the Minister and his officials on that work. At the Committee meeting on 14 May, the Minister indicated that there is a duty to listen, reflect and change course where necessary. The Committee welcomes that approach. Members also heard a commitment to maximise collaboration and share delivery across government, local government and wider partnerships. That is also the right direction. The purpose of the motion is to encourage and strengthen that approach. The final strategy must be more than a statement of ambition; it must be costed, measurable, locally deliverable and accountable. The question for the Assembly, therefore, is whether the final strategy will simply acknowledge work that is already being done or build the structures needed to sustain and strengthen that work and introduce significant new measures. To close, I will reflect on a phrase that was used in a Committee session: we were asked to be bold, to be compassionate and to be change-makers. That is a fair challenge to this Assembly, the whole Executive and the Minister for Communities. The Committee's report offers the Minister a practical route to improve the final anti-poverty strategy. It asks that local government be given its proper place and voice and that local interventions be supported. Most importantly, it asks that the anti-poverty strategy not simply describes the scale of the problem but creates the structures, resources and accountability to tackle it. I commend the motion to the House and urge Members to support it.

1,458 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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