NI Hardship Fund 'inadequate' warns Derry rep: Call for Ant-poverty Strategy to be brought in now

A motion, put forward by People Before Profit councillor Shaun Harkin at a Governance and Strategic Planning Committee meeting on Tuesday, May 7, proposed writing to the Minister for Communities, Gordon Lyons, seeking clarification on plans to “implement an anti-poverty strategy with a ring-fenced budget”.

The proposal stated that he council were “concerned at the lack of clarity from the Minister and the Stormont Executive regarding the legal duty to implement a strategy”, and also invited representatives of the Equality Coalition for a presentation.

At Tuesday’s meeting, an Officers’ report stated that a £4 million, non-recurrent budget was allocated to local councils last year to “support vulnerable people affected by the cost-of-living crisis”.

Derry City and Strabane District received £316,724 of this fund and, as the council held £124,690.21 for the DfC in reserves, the overall hardship support budget for the district was £441,414.21.

Councillor Harkin said the Fund was “completely inadequate at the time, given the scale of need”.

“Both Stormont’s and Westminster’s interventions during the Cost-of-Living Crisis have been disgraceful,” Councillor Harkin said. “And what we have right now is the normalisation of more entrenched levels of poverty and deprivation.

“Every penny we get from Stormont we need to get it out to people who need it and I think organisations on the ground have been doing stellar work helping people, but they haven’t been able to help enough people.

“Unfortunately the budget the DfC gave us made it very difficult and I’m not sure what else could be done with such a limited amount of money.

“Stormont has been back for four months now and there was an expectation we would have an anti-poverty strategy that’s funded, but there’s a lack of clarity coming from the Minister.

“The consensus amongst those helping people in need is that we can’t be fire-fighting and we need a strategy to deal with poverty.

“That means upgrading benefits, higher wages, and childcare for people who can’t afford it. Until we do that, everybody on the ground is going to be fire-fighting.”

SDLP councillor Rory Farrell agreed that the need to address the Cost -of-Living Crisis was “still there” and asked if any discussions had taken place with DfC about similar funding for this year.

Councillor Farrell added; “We had the Budget recently and there was no mention of any support for families facing distress and deprivation.

“One in five children in this council area are experiencing poverty and the problem is actually getting worse, so we need to see a financed anti-poverty strategy and we need to see it now.

“People in the North have been waiting for an overarching plan to address poverty for 26 years.

“It’s a pretty long time, so we should be championing anything to improve the standard of living for people in this city and district.”

Andrew Balfour,

Local Democracy Reporter