Programme for Government Risks Deepening Inequality

The Northern Ireland Executive’s newly unveiled Programme for Government risks deepening inequality and leaving LGBTQIA+ communities behind in key policy areas across the board, including addressing homelessness, health inequalities and building social cohesion.

“Our Plan: Doing What Matters Most” is the Executive’s shared Programme for Government, agreed and published at the end of February.

The Rainbow Project, alongside our colleagues in HereNI, submitted a joint response to the public  consultation on this Programme, which you can find below.

We raised a number of key issues, particularly the lack of direct mention or inclusion of any LGBTQIA+-specific issues such as progressing a ban on conversion practices and improving non-discrimination and equalities legislation.

While we broadly agreed with the Executive’s nine key missions, and understand that this is intended to be a Programme for improving services and wellbeing for all in Northern Ireland, we believe it is vital to recognise where particular issues disproportionately affect marginalised communities.

This is particularly important in the context of the Department for Communities’ failure to bring forward the LGBTQIA+ Social Inclusion Strategy, promised in the 2020 New Decade New Approach agreement, or even to set out a timeline for its publication.

This was the key issue we raised with HereNI in our consultation response (read here), and disappointingly one not addressed in the final Programme for Government. The lack of direct recognition of how various issues disproportionately affect particular groups, including LGBTQIA+ communities, and the failure to even mention LGBTQIA+ communities by name beyond a vague reference to ‘promoting equality’ for various protected characteristics, including based on sexual orientation.

We further highlighted the gaps in data-collection, which contributes to this failure to identify where these issues affect certain groups disproportionately. A key example of this is homelessness, one of the indicators informing the ‘Better Homes’ mission. We know from our work within LGBTQIA+ communities and from UK-wide research that homelessness disproportionately affects LGBTQIA+ people, particularly LGBTQIA+ youth. However, the ‘Outcomes Framework’, which is intended to provide a set out measurable outcomes by which the success of the Programme for Government can be assessed, outlines a number of areas where ‘sexual orientation’ data simply is not collected.

These tables outline the indicators the Executive is using to measure the performance of its Programme for Government, broken down by characteristics. While it is to be welcomed that the Executive has placed some concrete targets and measurables within the Programme, we are concerned at the number of areas where data is not broken down by gender and sexual orientation, which could prevent work being done to address key inequalities for LGBTQIA+ people.

We have continued to raise these issues in all our engagements with Executive parties, including our recent meeting with Carál Ní Chuilín and Sinéad Ennis, Sinn Féin’s Equalities Spokesperson and Chief Whip respectively, and our ongoing engagements with other parties around the Executive table. You can read our response to the Draft Programme for Government, and the finalised Programme, below.

Read our Consultation Response


Read the Programme for Government