Draft Anti-Poverty Strategy should be dumped - NI Anti Poverty Network

Goretti Horgan and Becca Bor, chair and development co-ordinator respectively of the NI Anti-Poverty Network, have critiqued the Executive’s draft Anti-Poverty Strategy in an in-depth interview with The Derry News.

The Anti-Poverty Strategy was published on June 17 by Communities Minister Gordon Lyons (DUP). An extended 14-week consultation process on the document will close on September 19, 2025.  

A number of prominent individuals and organisations across civic society in the North subsequently co-signed a letter expressing “dismay and frustration” at the Strategy.

Among others, the letter was signed by the Ulster Farmers Union, St Vincent de Paul, Bernadette McAliskey (Expert Panel), Dr Ciara Fitzpatrick (Ulster University), and Goretti Horgan (Ulster University). 

Critiquing the document, Becca Bor said fundamentally the description ‘strategy’ was a misnomer.

“A strategy needs to have targets. It needs to have indicators in order to measure those targets. It needs to have a time frame. It should have a budget associated with it,” she said.

“None of those things are present in the draft Anti-Poverty Strategy.”

Goretti Horgan added the Strategy was so “flimsy” when it was published, she and Becca Barnes joked with each to see how many ‘targets’ in it they could find.

“Initially it looked like we might only find a couple, we literally couldn’t find a single one,” said Ms Horgan, a member of the Anti-Poverty Expert Panel Advisor Group set up by then Communities Minister Deirdre Hargey (Sinn Féin) in 2020.

“We were put under a lot of pressure to get it done in a matter of weeks. We submitted it on December 22, 2020. The other people on the panel were: Mike Tomlinson, Queen’s University, Belfast; Bernadette McAliskey; and Pauline Leeson, Children in Northern Ireland,” she added.

“We were asked to give evidence-based recommendations of what would make a difference to poverty. 

“Essentially, we said, ‘This is what makes a difference’. We know from all of the evidence, what makes a difference is bringing down the costs for households and putting a bit of extra money into their purses. That wasn’t the Expert Panel saying that, it was all of the evidence.

“We gave them a huge number of recommendations. We never expected they would implement them all but being a politician and governing is about making political choices. So we said, ‘Here’s what the evidence says would make a difference, now it’s up to you politicians to decide which bit of that you are going to run with. 

“Not only did they not run with any of it, they didn’t even bother to include some of the recommendations that don’t cost anything in this draft Anti-Poverty Strategy,” said Ms Horgan.

According to Becca Bor, following the submission of recommendations by the Expert Panel, Deirdre Hargey convened a co-design group comprising various members across civic society -  including the community and voluntary sector and  unions. 

“The co-design group was tasked with looking at the Expert Panel’s recommendations and breaking them down even further,” explained Ms Bor.

“Co-design is a generous term for that process. It met with the Department but the Department never gave any feedback. The co-design group could never see how or whether or not it was influencing anything the Department was doing.

“When Stormont collapsed in 2022 the co-design group was in limbo so some members of the group published what they had at that point, as a ‘marker’. 

“When Gordon Lyons came into office in 2024, the co-design group was officially stood down. 

“The group made numerous requests to the Minister to meet it and discuss the anti-poverty strategy but he refused, right up until the Strategy was finished. He allowed the co-design group to see it before it went public but not with any influence or back and forth,” said Ms Bor, who added the group was “pretty dismayed at what it saw”.

“Our understanding is that when Gordon Lyons became minister, there was a draft anti-poverty strategy the Communities Department was working on that basically was tossed aside and the Department used other information,” said Ms Bor.

“It looks as if the ‘evidence’ used in the published Anti-Poverty Strategy is an internal, department literature review. If you look at all of the statistics, they are all five to seven years old.”

“They were more out of date than the statistics provided to the Expert Panel in 2020,” said Goretti Horgan. 

“Some of the language used by Minister Lyons when he first came into office about the recommendations he had received from the Expert Panel and the work the co-design group had done, was really insulting,” she added, “given we had been asked to do this work”.

“He said it was a ‘wishlist’, which it very clearly wasn’t. It was evidence-based recommendations. He said we were ‘interest groups’ and ‘lobbyist groups’ and he didn’t want ‘outside [of government] interference’ even though government had established the Expert Panel,” said Ms Horgan. 

“Our feeling is what is fundamentally wrong with this draft Anti-Poverty Strategy is it is not a strategy,” emphasised Becca Bor.

“It needs to be dumped and  a return made to the recommendations from the Expert Panel and the co-design group,” she added.

“The framework of the published Strategy is extremely individualistic. It is about individuals falling into poverty. Individuals climbing themselves out of poverty. 

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'Dismay and frustration' at Executive's Anti Poverty Strategy

A number of prominent individuals and organisations  across civic society in the North have co-signed a letter opposing the Anti Poverty Strategy

“The rhetoric, the language within this Strategy stigmatises people who are in poverty. That is very problematic.

“We need a strategy that looks at the systemic reasons for poverty, which looks at a life-cycle approach to populations and also looks at increasing income at the household level and decreasing costs at the household level - not just at the neighbourhood level or area level.

“There are loads of recommendations. For example, child poverty is growing and one of the policy recommendations that has been completely dismissed by the Minister and the Department has been the Child Payment that has been introduced in Scotland. The Department has called this an ‘artificial prop’,” said Ms Bor.

The Scottish Child Payment is a weekly payment of £27.15 made by the Scottish Government to low-income families for each child they are responsible for under 16. 

“We suggested a child payment of £15 per week, which would make an incredible difference to families,” said Goretti Horgan.

“There is research which shows that even as little as £10 per week extra into the mother’s purse basically improves outcomes for everybody,” she added.

“It improves parental mental health, which means parenting can be a bit calmer. That extra bit of money can mean food is healthier. It improves children’s educational outcomes. It improves their health outcomes. It improves their mental health outcomes and it improves their outcomes when they are adults - as little as £10 per week.”