Embedding Wellbeing – Carnegie Response to Programme for Government

Carnegie UK Trust (CUKT) has recently published its response to the NI Programme for Government consultation, Embedding a Wellbeing Framework in Northern Ireland.

Since 2017, the Embedding Wellbeing in Northern Ireland project has provided support to three community planning partnerships – Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council, Derry and Strabane District Council, and Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council. Based on information gleaned from this project, CUKT now expands upon it to recommend six ways, as shown below, that the NI Excutive can embed wellbeing as an outcome that it can measure against.

What this means is that the wellbeing outcomes approach should have a statutory footing, requiring agencies and tiers of government to work together on community planning.

Success will, of course, be determined by adequate government funding, so Carnegie proposes that budgets should be aligned with outcomes in the Programme for Government and that ‘ring-fenced multi-year funding’ should be provided for community planning.

Finally, CUKT recommends that the Local Government (Northern Ireland) Act 2014 be amended so that regeneration is included in local government’s remit. Doing so, as part of a much-delayed “augmentation review,” will complete the transfer to local level of the power required to address inequalities.

Full details of each recommendation are included in the full report available to download now.