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

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 26 May 2026.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

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 5582571

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I commend the Committee for its important work on the report. The North has waited at least 20 years for an anti-poverty strategy, but all that we have had so far is a vague, unambitious document with no clear targets, no concrete measures and no overarching commitment to eradicating poverty. That is a slap in the face to the working-class communities who have been ground down by poverty and deprivation under the Executive's watch. During the two decades of waiting, poverty has skyrocketed, so much so that, in my constituency of West Belfast, one in three children lives in poverty and, in the past five years, the number of pensioners living in poverty has almost doubled. Those are completely disgraceful and shocking statistics. The Committee's report paints a stark picture. I will quote from it:

"the overwhelming and unified consensus from local government is that the draft Anti-Poverty Strategy currently lacks the necessary clarity, ambition, and structural integration to be fully transformative."

That is probably the Committee being polite. As the Committee's report states:

"the draft strategy is largely blind to the role of local delivery partners"

on the ground — Committee members have spoken to that — and does not properly define the role of community planning partnerships. The Committee heard about:

"the severe financial fragility of the community and voluntary sector".

That is the same sector that has recently been decimated by cuts resulting from the introduction of the local growth fund. The Minister says that he wants the anti-poverty strategy to support people into work, but he and his Executive colleagues refused to step in with the necessary funding when Westminster cut off access to employability support for some 11,000 people here. I hope that the Minister's revised strategy will be a dramatic departure from the current draft, which is totally unacceptable and unsuitable.

I also hope that we see it soon and that working-class communities are not strung along further by the Minister.

As the Committee's report makes clear, poverty can be tackled only in a genuinely cross-cutting, cross-departmental way. The structural drivers of housing, childcare, rural transport and sustainable funding for the community and voluntary sector, which Members have mentioned, require coordinated action to be taken across every Department, and I am not convinced that that is happening yet. The answers to tackling poverty are not a mystery; they are in the expert panel's original proposals. The Minister does not need to look far. The decades-long failure to properly tackle poverty belongs to the entire Stormont Executive. Rather than facing that failure, we have seen cynical sectarianism, the scapegoating of migrants and the mimicking of Trump's anti-woke, pro-war crusades from the Minister and the DUP in general: anything to distract from the housing crisis and the general rise in poverty, healthcare waiting lists and other things that are wreaking havoc on our communities.

Sure.

Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker. I do not know whether the Member was listening, but I have two pages of notes that I just spoke about. I urge her, if she wishes to reduce poverty, to put pressure on her Minister to start implementing the rent controls and the no-fault eviction ban to which the Minister and the Member's party are completely opposed. If the Member is interested in tackling poverty, she should put pressure on her Minister in that way.

That is not true, Minister. I sent you a detailed document several weeks ago. If you have not read it, that is your fault. Maybe you should go and read it. It details the fact that most European countries and North American cities have a form of rent control. The Minister repeats the myth that rent controls do not work. They do not work for landlords, and maybe that is why the Minister is opposed to them, but they do work in that they reduce rent for renters. Minister, I suggest that you read that report and come back to me on it. Westminster and Stormont could eradicate poverty if they wanted to. Instead, they hand tax breaks and rate reliefs to corporations that turn over millions and, in some cases, billions of pounds in revenue and profit while funnelling money away from public services and into the profiteering private sector, with no objection from this or any other Minister. Poverty is a political choice, and the Executive have chosen to make ordinary people poor while the rich get richer. Without mass pressure from below, Stormont, in its current form, will never do more than tinker at the edges. That has always been the way. In truth, it is people power that will force change and eradicate the scourge of poverty from our communities.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:40 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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