T7. Ms Egan asked the Minister for Communities for his assessment of the cost to his Department of public services in addressing poverty, following a presentation to the Committee for Communities last week by the British Association of Social Workers. (AQT 417/22-27)

Poverty has costs to the individual and to society as a whole. Research shows clear evidence that poverty affects a child's start in life. It increases the risk of poor health and well-being and of below-average educational outcomes, and it can impact on development in a child's early years. It is equally clear that intervening early to address the issues that people suffering socio-economic disadvantage face will have long-term positive impacts on those individuals, potentially freeing resources for use elsewhere. I am therefore determined to deliver an Executive anti-poverty strategy that helps children and young people to get the best possible start in life, have the opportunity to live in safe, stable homes, have a good education and get a good job. Those issues can be tackled only by collective action by our Executive. I want to make sure that, as an Executive, we have alignment of approach, and a focus on prevention and early intervention will be essential.

Thank you, Minister. Do you agree that, in order to better address the issue, we should have an Executive-wide audit of the cost of poverty to our public services, especially given the situation that we are in with our public finances?

That is certainly an important part of the work that we do in the Department for Communities. Monitoring the impact of our work is very important, and we want to make sure that we have robust data when it comes to measuring the impact of the Executive's anti-poverty strategy in the short, medium and longer term. To support the development of the anti-poverty strategy, departmental officials have conducted a number of research projects as part of DFC's economic and social research programme. The research has shown that many factors are identified across the literature that increase the risk of falling into poverty. Many have been found to stem from early years, with multiple childhood factors heavily affecting the risk of poverty in the future. That data is important, and we have it to an extent in the Department, but it is an interesting idea to make sure that we have that across the Executive, because it is important that we are able to define exactly what the problem is, understand how we fix it and measure that against the targets that we set. Having the data will be important to doing that.