Rights groups challenge NI Executive to fulfil anti-poverty pledge
Stormont spends almost £1 billion pounds a year dealing with child poverty, according to Trussell NI. Imagine what life would look like if our elected representatives had a concrete plan and list of actions to tackle poverty instead?
Civil society in Northern Ireland has been organising all week in support of an anti-poverty strategy.
On Monday, campaigners took their demands to the steps of Parliament Buildings. Wednesday saw the publication of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s UK Poverty 2025 report, while on Friday, public attention shifts to the courtroom.
Today, the Committee on the Administration of Justice are challenging the NI Executive’s ongoing failure to create an anti-poverty strategy.
Supported by PILS, and backed by civil society colleagues, CAJ are demanding that the Executive keeps the promise it made in the 2007 St. Andrew’s Agreement to adopt a strategy setting out how it proposes to tackle poverty, social exclusion and patterns of deprivation.
PILS are proud to connect CAJ with pro bono legal representation and the financial support it needed to get this case into court.
More information on our Pro Bono Register and Litigation Fund services is available here.
Background
- The respondents are the Department for Communities, the Executive Office, and the First and deputy First Ministers.
- S28E of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (as amended at St Andrews) places a legal obligation on the Stormont Executive to “adopt a strategy setting out how it proposes to tackle poverty, social exclusion and patterns of deprivation based on objective need.”
- In 2015 a similar JR taken by CAJ with support from PILS found the Stormont Executive had acted unlawfully in not discharging the legal obligations to adopt the Anti-Poverty Strategy in that mandate.
- CAJ co-convenes the Equality Coalition network with the trade union UNISON. Through the Coalition, UNISON, the NI Anti-Poverty Network and Barnardo’s NI have been active in campaigning for the Anti-Poverty Strategy.
