Bringing Hope, Building Futures: Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2026-2031 – annex 10: Islands Communities Impact Assessment (ICIA)

Step six – making adjustments to your work

As noted above, the overall assessment is that the interventions proposed in the tackling child poverty delivery plan are relevant to island communities and should result in positive outcomes for children and their families. No negative impacts have been identified.

However, given that each unique island community context has specific needs and requirements, and the delivery plan contains a breadth actions cutting across a range of policy areas, it will be important to monitor and evaluate the policy package as it develops.

The adjustments below relate to the delivery plan as a whole, recognising that individual areas will identify and adjust policy specific interventions through their own ICIAs.

Recommendations:

• Data and networks – data limitations may hamper the ability to fully understand the different aspects of child poverty in island communities, particularly in relationship to priority family types. There is an inherent limitation to the use of quantitative data when population sizes are often small, but to mitigate this factor and strengthen policy design and implementation, the child poverty delivery plan should support efforts to strengthen island local authorities capacity to analyse and use quantitative and qualitative data, particularly strengthening partnerships with local networks to deliver on child poverty actions;
• Working with island local authorities – this impact assessment has been informed by consultation with some island authorities, but further interrogation of island communities in light of the published delivery plan would help to refine policy commitments. This should be explored as part of a follow on to the existing research, and in line with existing work such as the Rural Child Poverty Network.
• Individual ICIAs of policies and actions should be carried out as early as possible to inform the delivery of new commitments within the plan.