The Way Forward towards an Anti-Poverty Strategy

Since 1998 New Targeting Social Need (New TSN) has been the Government’s high level policy for combating the problems of unemployment, increasing employability and addressing the causes of social exclusion.

New TSN is not a separate programme with a dedicated budget but a general approach to programme development and delivery involving all departments, skewing effort and resources towards those in greatest objective need.

Following devolution, the Northern Ireland Executive adopted New TSN as its approach to tackling poverty and social exclusion and published its first action plan, ‘Making it work' in March 2001.

In adopting the policy the former Executive committed to evaluating it during 2002 in order to inform future policy direction.

Following the completion of an external evaluation of New TSN in 2003 (PDF 305.71 KB, 71 pages) government launched proposals for a wider Anti-Poverty Strategy – The way forward (PDF 6874.55 KB, 60 pages).

These proposals went out to public consultation in April 2004.

The initial public consultation ended in October 2004 and 103 responses were received from a wide range of groups including political parties, and voluntary and community sector representatives.

These responses were individually analysed by officials and a revised set of proposals produced, taking on board many of the comments made.

The re-drafted document, New TSN - The way forward a consultation document phase 2 (PDF 514 KB) went out for a second period of consultation from 20^th June 2005 to 9^th September 2005.

The Government's new startegy to tackle poverty and social exclusion will be launched soon.

The new approach will place a requirement on departments and agencies to contribute to a regional action plan containing targets towards poverty related outcomes.

In order to be successful in this, the challenge is to bring together departments, agencies and the voluntary sector to work collaboratively. This combining of expertise will be the key to providing more effective outcomes.

Co-ordination and implementation of the action plan will be the responsibility of the Central Anti-Poverty Unit- the first action plan is expected in the autumn of 2006.