As we move into July, the Women’s Regional Consortium continues to work alongside partners and campaign groups to advocate for policies that tackle poverty, support carers, and strengthen social security protections for women and families across Northern Ireland. This month’s update highlights our ongoing involvement in the Guarantee Our Essentials campaign, our work with the Coalition of Carers, and recent developments within the Cliff Edge Coalition, including the significant achievement of the removal of the two-child limit. Together, these campaigns reflect our commitment to ensuring that women’s voices and lived experiences are at the heart of policy change and social justice efforts. We invite you to read on to learn more about the issues we are supporting and the progress being made.
Campaigns: Guarantee our Essentials
The Women’s Regional Consortium is part of a campaign from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Trussell Trust calling for an Essentials Guarantee within Universal Credit. The Essentials Guarantee would embed in the social security system a principle that at a minimum Universal Credit should protect people from going without essentials.
You can read more about the campaign here:
https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/guarantee-our-essentials
Campaigns: Coalition of Carers
Siobhán Harding from Women’s Support Network continues to attend regular meetings of the Coalition of Carers on behalf of the Women’s Regional Consortium. The Coalition is made up of a number of organisations all working to highlight the key issues that carers are facing across Northern Ireland.
Campaigns: Cliff Edge
The Women’s Regional Consortium continues to attend meetings of the Cliff Edge Coalition Working Group which is working to strengthen the existing mitigations package for Northern Ireland.
Cliff Edge are delighted to see the scrapping of the two-child limit which has had bigger impacts in Northern Ireland due to larger family sizes here. This has been the result of years of campaigning on this issue and the Cliff Edge Coalition are pleased to finally see one of its key campaigning asks achieved.
The Cliff Edge Coalition are currently working on refreshing their strengthening asks for the NI mitigations package and hope to have these finalised and ready to feed into election manifestos in the coming months.
