Ms Karen Kiernan:

This is an interesting and challenging question to answer because it is difficult to limit the response to three things. There are high-level issues that we know are challenging in respect of child poverty, and then there are specific things that we are thinking about that perhaps apply to one-parent families. One of the important aspects is the need to target. We may need quick wins along the way as we try to achieve more systematic change and become a country that does not tolerate child poverty from the top down. In that respect, there is a need to target those families and children who need interventions. We are talking in this context about one-parent families, families where a child or parent has a disability and minority ethnic families. We must get the processes and systems right to be able to achieve that goal but we really need childcare services. We need high-quality, funded, publicly-available childcare as the bedrock of change. We also need families to have roofs over their heads. Those are the current failings in the system that we must try to address.

There are also specific issues in the context of social protection, involving making work pay and enabling people to get into education, training and employment. To be honest, those issues represent the possibility of quicker wins, if there was the will to do them.

I am sorry for not answering the question clearly. It is a great one, if we can figure these aspects out. One of the things we could do, for example, is implement the recommendations of the 2017 report of the Joint Committee on Social Protection concerning the position of lone parents, which is mentioned in the programme for Government. Much of what we want is contained in that report.