Resetting the Relationship? – Launch of the Partnership Agreement
September 9, 2025
The launch of the new Partnership Agreement between government and the community and voluntary sector in Northern Ireland offers a timely and much-needed opportunity to reset how these two groups work together.
The Agreement sets out the shared values that are supposed to shape that relationship moving forward.
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- Accountability
- Active Participation
- Social Justice
- Independence
- Collaboration
- Sustainability
For each of these values there is also a corresponding set of ‘ways of working together’ that it is believed will help deliver those values practically.
The Human Rights Consortium, along with our civil society and public sector colleagues helped shape the Agreement during our time on the Joint Forum. We strongly believe that these values must not just be decorative. They are essential to how public services should be designed, delivered, and held to account. The proof of how effective the Partnership Agreement is will be the degree to which civil society and the public sector can make these values and ways of working an everyday part of our system of governance.
Human Rights/Social Justice
The Consortium was particularly active in trying to embed human rights principles and practice throughout the Partnership Agreement.
The Social Justice value is listed as : ‘A shared commitment to human rights, equality, and anti-discrimination. This involves promoting, advancing, and protecting human rights and equality in our society while recognising the intersectional impacts of inequality and discrimination experienced by individuals, groups, and communities.’
The ‘Ways of working’ listed against this value also contain several important practices that if properly implemented could have a lasting impact on the protection and promotion of rights and equality in this jurisdiction.
- Uphold and promote international human rights standards.
- Act with due regard to statutory Section 75 and Rural Need commitments.
- Advocate for policies that support marginalised individuals and communities.
- Pursue and prioritise work that will help to address inequalities.
- Ensure work to tackle inequalities is informed by lived experiences.
For many years, these ways of working have been effectively ignored. There has been no progress on establishing a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights or indeed any other new human rights commitments that would advance adherence to international human rights standards, while Section 75 has been underutilised and misinterpreted to the point where it is falling far short of its potential to drive meaningful equality outcomes. Likewise, there is little evidence that public policy has been systematically designed to actively target and reduce inequalities.
However, if these commitments are now applied directly and actively to how the public sector operates and to how its relationship with civil society is structured and nurtured, there may be genuine cause for hope that a more just, inclusive, and rights-based system of governance can begin to emerge.
Learning from Recent Failures
However, this Agreement arrives against a backdrop of real concern about how civil society is treated by public authorities. Just months ago, the Department for Communities scrapped co-design groups that had been working on key equality strategies — including on poverty, gender, and disability. The Minister, Gordon Lyons, stated that he would not “outsource” policy to lobby groups, effectively sidelining the very communities these strategies were meant to serve.
This decision undermined years of collaborative work and sent a damaging message about the value of civil society input. It also stood in direct contradiction to the principles of active participation and collaboration that are central to the Partnership Agreement — a document that, at the time of the Minister’s remarks, was already on his desk awaiting approval. Not a good start. The recent published Draft Anti-Poverty Strategy, which has already been dubbed as not being fit for purpose by civil society , given its lack of measurables, concrete timebound targets or ring-fenced funding, is another example of the principles of collaboration, accountability and active participation in the Partnership Agreement being actively ignored, given that an anti-poverty co-design group worked on recommendations for this strategy, for them to then be ignored in this recent draft.
In that context, the Partnership Agreement is not a fix but it is a starting point. It sets out shared principles and expectations that civil society can now use to hold public authorities to account and to rebuild trust in how policy is made. But against the current political backdrop that remains a challenge.
A Tool — But Not a Guarantee
The existence of a new agreement does not automatically mean that relationships between civil society and public authorities will improve. We’ve been here before. The 2011 Concordat between the voluntary and community sector and the NI Executive was also full of warm words about shared values and principles.
But in practice, the Concordat proved ineffective in holding public authorities to account for failing to meet the standards it set out. While it provided a framework for engagement, it lacked the political backing needed to make it meaningful. Over time the Joint Forum, which was intended to give life to the Concordat, struggled to deliver tangible outcomes not because of a lack of effort or commitment from those involved, but because of the absence of sustained political support to implement its principles in practice.
In recent years, the Forum’s focus shifted toward the redevelopment of the Concordat into this new Partnership Agreement. The Consortium was deeply involved in that process for over three years.
The ambition for change and the need to reset the dial on accountability and participation was palpable among civil society. But this was often met with frustration, as civil servants were left to navigate the constraints imposed by Ministers and Executive level politics. Too often, it seemed, the willingness of officials to engage constructively was undermined by a political environment that lacked the will or the consensus to support progressive, participatory approaches to policymaking.
The NI Partnership also comes at the same time as the launch of the wider UK Civil Society Covenant, which similarly aims to establish a new partnership relationship between civil society and the public sector. The UK Covenant makes a commitment to help deliver ‘a fair, just and equitable society with improvements to people’s lives and protection of human rights’ and contains some important commitments to respecting the independence of civil society and listening to them in the policy design process. Like the NI Partnership, the value of the Covenant will be in whether it makes a substantive difference in resetting those relationships and improving outcomes in policy, legislation and the lives of people in our community.
Looking Ahead: A Legal Foundation
Crucially, the Department for Communities has committed to exploring legislative options to place the Agreement on a statutory footing. This is a long-standing ask from the community and voluntary sector and one the Consortium has consistently championed. Legislation, if designed properly, would give the Agreement real weight, ensuring that its principles are not left vulnerable to political whim or departmental discretion.
It’s important to remember that the call for legislation isn’t new. It had already been raised repeatedly within the Forum and echoed across wider civil society during a public consultation by the Department on the draft Agreement. The feedback was overwhelmingly supportive. Yet we were told that our ambition exceeded the appetite of Ministers in this regard. That response laid bare a deep reluctance to embrace meaningful accountability. A reluctance that continues to undermine public confidence in a system that too often equates democracy with little more than a vote every few years.
And that is precisely why Northern Ireland needs this Agreement and why it must be enshrined in law. The values and ways of working it sets out cannot be allowed to drift with the political winds or change with every new Minister. Our community and voluntary sector needs stability, consistency, and respect. That will only be achieved if the vision of the Partnership Agreement is protected from political volatility and upheld regardless of who holds office. It’s the same reason why we need our own Bill of Rights in legislation. So that the advancement and protection of rights cannot be continually hamstrung by the absence of enforceable standards, the vagueness of political will, or the selective interpretation of existing duties. Only through a firm legal foundation can we ensure that rights, equality, and anti-discrimination are not optional ideals but binding commitments, anchored in law, upheld in practice, and safeguarded for future generations.
The Partnership Agreement won’t change everything overnight. But it gives us something to work with and something to point to as we push for a more just, inclusive, and accountable relationship between civil society and the state.
Kevin Hanratty
Director
Human Rights Consortium
September 2025
Tags: civil society, Co-design, Covenant, Joint Forum, Partnership Agreement