One-in-five children in the north are living in relative poverty, according to a critical Audit Office report.
The Northern Ireland Audit Office has published its report into the Executive’s Child Poverty Strategy 2016-2022, which aimed to reduce the number of young people facing poverty and ease the impact it has on their futures.
The report found “little sustained progress” in reducing poverty among children, and was critical of the strategy for failing to include specific targets in its aims.
There was no ring-fenced budget attached to the strategy, the report found, while also noting a lack of focus on early intervention and preventative actions against poverty.
Around one-in-five children in the north are living in relative poverty, the report states, and between 7% and 9% live in households that cannot afford basic goods and essential activities.
Children in deprived areas are expected to live 11 to 15 fewer years in good health than more well-off peers, while youngsters receiving free school meals are twice as likely to leave school with no GCSEs.
Comptroller and Auditor General Dorinnia Carville found a lack of clarity at Stormont, with “different views about who was responsible for delivery” of the strategy, which was initially developed by the then-Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister before being passed to the Department for Communities to monitor and report on it.
The report states: “We found that while the strategy set out specific delivery responsibilities for other departments and they provided annual updates to the Department (for Communities) on progress against these, accountability and ownership mechanisms for the Strategy were not clearly understood by all.”
The Audit Office has made a series of recommendations on the delivery of a planned new anti-poverty strategy by the Executive - agreed under the New Decade, New Approach deal in 2020 - including for accountability arrangements to be “clearly outlined and agreed at the outset”.
Dorinnia Carville said: “Northern Ireland has not had a strategy to deal with child poverty for almost two years, during a cost-of-living crisis. A failure to tackle child poverty early and effectively risks lifelong impacts to children’s health, education and general development.
“There is also a considerable cost to the public purse, with previous estimates indicating costs of child poverty to be between £825 million and £1 billion annually.
“The Executive has committed to producing a new anti-poverty strategy. Today’s report offers a valuable opportunity to learn lessons for the development of this new strategy. These lessons include the need to focus on specific, long-term and preventive targets to save public money in the future. Early intervention, which reduces the number of children in poverty who become adults in poverty, could reduce future economic and social costs significantly.
“It is also important that the delivery of these actions is supported with clear accountability arrangements and a move away from silo working towards a truly collaborative cross-departmental approach to tackling this challenging but vitally important issue.”
Naomi McBurney, Policy and Public Affairs Adviser for Save the Children NI said the report “exposes the reality that children living in poverty here are being failed badly by government”.
“We are seeing the personal, social and economic impact of poverty play out in children’s lives while not being addressed properly,” she said.
“This report shows that to see sustained impact on child poverty levels there needs to be a targeted and collective approach to tackling it at Stormont.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Communities told the Irish News that addressing child poverty is a “priority” for the communities minister Gordon Lyons, and is a “key focus of ongoing work on the Executive’s Anti-poverty Strategy”.
“Officials are considering the issues raised in the NIAO’s recent review of the Executive’s Child Poverty Strategy and lessons learned will inform collective efforts across departments to tackle the root causes of poverty,” they added.
