Anti-Poverty Strategy must put Local Government at the heart of delivery, says Committee for Communities

The Northern Ireland Assembly will this week debate a report from the Committee for Communities that warns the Executive’s draft Anti-Poverty Strategy is at risk of falling short of its generational ambition unless local councils are at the core of its delivery.

The Committee’s Report on Engagement with Local Government on the draft Anti-Poverty Strategy will be brought to the floor of the Assembly on Tuesday 26 May 2026, when Members will be asked to take note of the report and to call on the Minister for Communities and the whole Executive to implement its recommendations.

Drawing on written and oral evidence from all 11 local councils, the report sets out a unified verdict from local government: that councils are already doing significant frontline work on the ground in administering emergency hardship funds, social supermarkets and Labour Market Partnerships.

Committee Chairperson, Colm Gildernew MLA, said: “Local councils are the glue holding anti-poverty work together in our communities. They were unanimous in telling us that the Anti-Poverty Strategy, in its initial draft, does not acknowledge that.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something truly meaningful about poverty in our communities.”

The report sets out a sobering picture of the scale of the challenge facing the updated Strategy. Evidence presented to the Committee included that over 110,000 children in Northern Ireland are living in poverty, with concentrations reaching 33% in parts of West Belfast; that six in ten children living in poverty are now in households where at least one adult is in work; and that, in Fermanagh and Omagh, 22% of people in the last year of their life are dying in poverty, unable to afford to heat their homes or buy proper food in their final days.

The Committee was also told that an emergency £100 fuel scheme run by Derry City and Strabane District Council received 5,500 referrals for just 2,400 available places, and was forced to close on the same day it opened.

Mr Gildernew added: “When more than one in five people in any part of the North are dying in poverty, that should stop the Executive in its tracks. And when the majority of children living in poverty have a parent in work, the idea that a job alone is a route out of hardship clearly is no longer holding.

“The Committee is clear that the Strategy will only succeed if it stops simply treating the symptoms and starts targeting the structural causes: housing, childcare, and rural transport, and a system that is failing to lift people up.”

The Committee heard stark warnings about the financial fragility of the community and voluntary sector. Witnesses reported that short-term, highly competitive funding cycles are forcing skilled frontline staff onto redundancy notice, even as advice services in some council areas brought millions of pounds in unclaimed benefits back into local economies.

“You simply cannot tackle poverty on a stop-start funding model,” Mr Gildernew said. “The Committee heard that the very people propping up our advice centres and social supermarkets are being handed redundancy letters in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.”

Committee Recommendations

The report makes six recommendations to the Minister for Communities and the wider Executive, including:

• Formally defining the role of local councils in the Strategy, and designating Community Planning Partnerships as the primary local delivery vehicles, supported by shared outcome agreements modelled on the Scottish approach;
• Aligning the Strategy with ring-fenced, multi-year funding to end the cycle of late year, competitive grant applications;
• Introducing mandatory Anti-Poverty Impact Assessments across all government departments before new policies, structural investments, or budget decisions are approved;
• Developing a cross-departmental project to unlock GDPR-compliant data sharing between central departments and local councils, so that need can be mapped and acted on at household level;
• Shifting the centre of gravity of the Strategy from short-term mitigation to long-term prevention, with measurable targets on social and affordable housing, regulation of the private rented sector, regional childcare, and rural and community transport;
• Establishing a permanent structure to embed people with lived experience of poverty in the ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the Strategy.

Concluding, Mr Gildernew said: “We will be asking the Assembly to send a clear, cross-party signal to the Executive: a Strategy that does not put councils, communities and people with lived experience at its core will not deliver the change we need.

“The Committee is asking the Minister and his Executive colleagues to take these recommendations on board – not in principle, but in practice.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

• The Committee for Communities’ Report on Engagement with Local Government on the draft Anti-Poverty Strategy (NIA 162/22-27) is available at www.niassembly.gov.uk.
• The Committee considered written and oral evidence from all 11 local councils. A dedicated oral evidence session was held on Thursday 5 March 2026, with councils giving evidence across three panels covering urban, suburban and rural districts.
• The Assembly will debate the Committee’s report on Tuesday 26 May 2026 as part of Committee Business. The motion is in the name of the Chairperson of the Committee for Communities and asks the Assembly to take note of the report and to call on the Minister for Communities and the Executive to implement the recommendations contained therein.
• The Committee for Communities is the statutory committee with responsibility for scrutinising the work of the Department for Communities. It is chaired by Colm Gildernew MLA. Its membership is drawn from Sinn Féin, the DUP, the UUP, the Alliance Party and the SDLP.
• For media enquiries, please contact the Assembly Communications Office.

Robbie Best, Deputy Communications and Digital Content Officer

Email: Robbie.Best@niassembly.gov.uk