Ulster Unionist Leader Mike Nesbitt has today commented on today’s publication of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research “Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Northern Ireland. 2012
Mr Nesbitt, who chairs the Assembly’s OFMdFM committee, said:
“This report makes extremely sobering reading for anyone who cares about the welfare of our society here in Northern Ireland.
In the three years to 2009/10, 22 per cent, more than one in five of our fellow citizens were living in poverty. The report also says that poverty for children, working-age adults and pensioners has risen since the middle of the last decade.
It is extremely worrying that the rise in pensioner poverty in Northern Ireland coincided with a fall in Great Britain, indicating that we are falling further behind the rest of the United Kingdom.
All the increase in poverty came in working or retired households and half of the 120,000 children in poverty live in working households.
These findings are a stark reminder of the scale of the problem facing us as policy makers and as a society.
We already have a child poverty strategy and it is now essential that we quickly produce an action plan that will deliver results. We also need to target areas of deprivation and we need to use the Social Investment Fund where it will have the greatest impact.”