New and concerning data is shining a light on poverty across the north, from unprecedented homelessness (nearly 32,000 households with Full Duty Applicant homeless status, including over 20,000 children) to increasingly widespread hunger (520,000 people, including 130,000 children, living in food insecure households).

How did we get here? As part of the peace, the NI Act 1998 (section 28E) placed a legal obligation on the NI Executive to produce a strategy to “tackle poverty, social exclusion and patterns of deprivation based on objective need”. Over two decades later, this remains undone.

In 2015 the High Court found that NI authorities acted unlawfully in failing to produce a strategy. The Department for Communities eventually set up an Anti-Poverty Strategy Expert Advisory Panel (which issued detailed recommendations in December 2020) and a larger Co-Design Group (which recently published an  update of its 2022 recommendations).

No strategy emerged. In  March 2025 the High Court examined the issue again and again found the authorities (this time, the NI Executive) to be in breach of their legal obligations under section 28E.

The Executive finally opened consultation on the long-anticipated draft strategy in June 2025. The public reaction was prompt and sharp. The evidence-based recommendations produced by the expert and co-design groups were nowhere reflected in the draft. PPR was amongst the signatories to an 8 July Open Letter urging the Executive to withdraw its support for the draft as it was not fit for purpose. The Open Letter was also signed by the four Expert Panel members and by members of its Co-Design Group.

In the face of clear advice from its own chosen experts and advisors that they needed to start again, the authorities instead chose to forge ahead.

As the NI Anti-Poverty Network’s response to the flawed draft explains, it lacks everything from identified resources to independent oversight to specific, measurable and time-bound indicators, targets and actions. The failure to engage meaningfully and systematically with people living with these issues has resulted in a document that “reinforce(s) the stigmatisation of people experiencing poverty, making it an individual problem which can be solved by changes to ‘lifestyle’ – while ignoring the systemic causes of poverty”.

Insistently battering on in the wrong direction isn’t leadership or progress; it’s the latest chapter in the state’s ongoing dereliction of its duty towards people in poverty. The DFC and the Executive have a wealth of experience- and evidence-based recommendations from the Expert Panel and co-design strategy group; it urgently needs to follow them.

Read the full consultation response here.