Child poverty plans questioned
Northern Ireland’s child poverty strategy is to be presented to the Assembly in March but critics claim it lacks detail. Emma Blee reports.
Around 174,000 children in Northern Ireland are thought to be currently living in poverty and the number is expected to rise as job and welfare cuts hit hard.
Under the UK-wide Child Poverty Act, OFMDFM is required to put together a child poverty strategy by March. Launching the consultation in December, Robin Newton said that the prospect of cuts “makes it even more important to focus on this issue, to decide what we need to do to tackle it and decide what we need to keep doing to prevent the situation from getting worse”.
After nine weeks of consultation, the document is now being revised and will be presented to the Assembly before dissolution on 24 March. Its main aim is to “provide for all our children and young people to thrive and to address the causes and consequences of disadvantage”.
To do this, it sets out four strategic priorities:
• to make sure, as far as possible, that being poor in childhood does not mean that a child has poor future e.g. in health, education, employment and other opportunities in life;
• to help more parents get paid jobs; • to ensure that children have positive environments that help them develop e.g. good housing, decent neighbourhoods, opportunities for play and leisure;
• to give financial help to families where it is most needed.
The document outlines priority policy areas such as health, education, housing, parental employment, and financial support. It also sets out action areas for each priority but it does very little to set measurable targets.
To get parents into work, it suggests “working to make the economy stronger so that there will be more businesses here and jobs” and “continue to persuade the UK Government to increase the income of families with children.” However, there are no targets to measure the progress of these.
“Helping people to manage their money” and “trying to make sure that children living in poverty don’t lose out on important things” are some of the actions put forward to give families financial support.
Ian Parsley, an advisor to the Centre for Social Justice, has criticised the strategy, branding it as “weak”. The councillor worked on the Breakthrough Northern Ireland report which analysed the scale and specific nature of child poverty.
Parsley’s interest in the subject came as he “was interested in the practicalities of politics and not just the theory”. He says the opportunity to work on the report gave him a chance to go out and meet people actually suffering from child poverty and try to come up with solutions.
He claims that “despite the fine words, the Executive and Civil Service management between them have no ideas whatsoever about what to do” about child poverty.
Referring to the child poverty strategy’s priorities and proposals, he says there is “no evidence base” and “no direction to work from”.
“It doesn’t say anything strategically about what the Executive is going to do about child poverty,” he remarks.
Parsley is also critical of the way in which the strategy measures child poverty: “I think our measurements of child poverty are seriously flawed. It is calculated as a percentage of income and that’s not a good way to do it. What you’re actually measuring there is inequality, it’s not poverty. In my view the measurements in the document are almost useless.”
He says that the Executive have been “throwing money at this for decades” and the levels have got worse. He argues that less consultation and more leadership is needed. He also believes that the language used by the Civil Service should be clearer and less complicated as this would “vastly enhance productivity”.
Joining up
An inter-departmental approach is essential, he says, and funding for child poverty should come from an Executive programme fund.
Parsley thinks that too much of the child poverty strategy is based on statistics and a more “anecdotal” approach would be more useful: “They talk about going into the community but nothing beats going into a classroom of children whose parents have left them and speaking to them.
“Until you actually experience those things you can’t even begin to write policy. You have to go out and actually speak to people.”
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation – a policy research charity – has welcomed the “attempt in the child poverty strategy to address a broad range of issues”. However, it has urged the Executive to revise and reshape the strategy in order to outline “the priorities it intends to follow, the actions it will take and the resources available”.
It also recommends that more precise goals and targets in each of the priority areas are developed, as well as measurable milestones for each action. “Close attention” should be paid to greater joint working between departments as there is such a broad range of policy areas.
A spokeswoman for the charity said: “This will support both effective action and productive discussion about reducing child poverty in Northern Ireland.”
