Ms Louise Bayliss:

We do not have poverty targets enshrined in legislation, which is something we think would be really important to do. For instance, in Scotland child poverty targets are enshrined in legislation and there has been a real drop in the rate of child poverty in Scotland but we are seeing the opposite. We must put the legislation in place and make sure that budgetary decisions reflect the findings of a budgetary impact analysis of whether there will be a reduction in child poverty or an increase in child poverty or even a reduction in poverty overall. Let us face it, child poverty and disability, obviously, are really high areas of poverty. We should put legislative targets in place and work through that. The representatives from IHREC mentioned its replacement for the Roadmap for Social Inclusion. We in the Society of St. Vincent de Paul did one as well; we produced a 32-page document with all our recommendations. We need something like that. We definitely need something that holds the State to account and is not just aspirational. I say that because one of the targets in the current Roadmap for Social Inclusion was the setting of a child poverty target. We do not have a child poverty target and, without it, we see child poverty rising. We understand the importance of having targets.