AQW 47744/11-15

Mr Stewart Dickson
Alliance Party
East Antrim

Tabled Date: 25/06/2015
Answered On Date: 08/07/2015
Priority Written: No

Question:
To ask the Minister for Social Development to outline his Department’s responsibilities in regards to achieving child poverty targets.

Answer:

The Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister currently has lead responsibility within the Executive for tackling child poverty. However, my Department has responsibility for many of the policy and operational levers to address poverty and disadvantage on the ground, thus it has a key role in contributing to the achievement of child poverty targets. These policies and programmes include: the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy; the provision of decent and affordable housing; action to address fuel poverty; improved child maintenance arrangements and the delivery of comprehensive social security arrangements.

My Department has committed to a number of important high level targets and supporting actions within the proposed new Child Poverty Strategy 2014-2017. Examples include the delivery of new social and affordable housing, the provision of specialist housing and debt advice to households having difficulty paying their mortgage, the provision of childcare places to assist parents in low income families to increase their skills and gain education and training to avail of paid employment; the support of 30 Nurture Units in local primary schools; and delivery of projects designed to promote social, economic, physical and community renewal in 36 Neighbourhood Renewal Areas. We have also committed to contributing to actions being led by other departments and organisations.

As part of our work on improving the uptake of benefits, the Department is developing a Household Income Administrative Database to assess eligibility for means tested benefit. This database should improve our capacity to better target those eligible for additional social security and other benefits.

My Department is also responsible for the measurement of poverty in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Poverty Bulletin 2013/14 was released on 25 June 2015 and provides annual estimates of the percentage and number of people, children, working age adults and pensioners living in low income households in Northern Ireland. The estimates are used to monitor progress towards United Kingdom targets to reduce poverty.