News Articles

Our Head of Policy, Kevin Higgins, recently briefed the Northern Ireland Assembly's Committee for Communities.

Advice NI is seeking to recruit volunteers from rural communities to deliver on a LINK funded project. As part of LINK's access to cash activities, LINK wishes to support and encourage digital inclusion in the UK, including through initiatives with selected groups and individuals.

Advice NI have partnered with SENAC to deliver a tailored Digital Skills programme for parents of children with additional needs.

Northern Ireland has the highest rate of non-internet users on these islands at 14.7% (Office of National Statistics, 2021. Digital 2021: Ireland).

Advice NI, in partnership with the Special Educational Needs Advice Centre (SENAC), plan to support carers of children with learning difficulties to become more digitally included enabling them to engage with policy and decision makers and to access their rights and entitlements. Funded by the Department of Health, this project will support carers to learn the digital skills to go online safely and to access their rights and entitlements. We will be sharing more updates on this project in our next edition of Advice Matters.

We welcome the announcement from Communities Minister Deirdre Hargey that the end date for bedroom tax mitigations has been removed.

As part of International Women’s Day 2019, Pay Plan published a series of blog posts with the theme ‘think equal, build smart, innovate for change’.

Advice NI, the independent advice charity, has identified serious systemic failures affecting Universal Credit claimants, in particular Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) claimants moving from ESA to Universal Credit (UC). 

It’s been a busy few months on the advice line. People concerned with the Welfare Mitigations Cliff Edge due at the end of March 2020. Something that could affect up to 35,000 households in Northern Ireland. See below for some recent cases from the Welfare Reform Team. 

It has been a busy year for us all in the advice sector with very little prospect of any easement in workload. Indeed, if some of the predictions regarding the impact of Brexit occur, then things are likely to get more difficult for many of our already hard-pressed families and communities.

We're offering free, half-day training sessions on Universal Credit for groups of 10 or more.

A client phoned the Independent Welfare Reform Helpline for advice on a PIP decision that was taking a long time. The client had migrated from DLA to PIP and in doing so had asked for a paper assessment.