Communities Minister Gordon Lyons has said that he does not know the full impact that the proposed benefit changes will have in Northern Ireland.
Minister Lyons was speaking in the Assembly Chamber on Monday after he faced a number of questions from MLAs on the issue.
This comes as he confirmed that he will be sharing a draft of his Anti-poverty Strategy with Executive ministers today.
Speaking in the chamber, Minister Gordon Lyons said: "I do not know the full impact for Northern Ireland at this time, and my officials are continuing to work closely with the Department for Work and Pensions to understand the full implications for Northern Ireland.
"Calculations on the UK-wide impact of the Green Paper were published along with the Chancellor's spring statement on the 26th of March. It will take time to understand the Northern Ireland impacts thereafter.
"I want to ensure that Northern Ireland has a welfare system that is fair for claimants and taxpayers and protects the most vulnerable.
"I will continue to engage with the UK Government to ensure that this happens, and also with executive colleagues as Northern Ireland does not have the resources to mitigate against these changes."
When asked if he believed that there was a better way to reform the Welfare State, the Communities Minister stated that he believed that "anything is better than the steps this government have outlined."
"I do believe that there is a way for us to reduce the welfare bill. That's something actually that we should all want to see, because we should want to try and help people, where possible, get back into work," the Minister continued.
"I believe there are ways in which we can do that. We only have to look at some of the successful job programmes that we have had here and the impact that that has not only in less money going out from the Treasury through benefits to help people but also additional money that you will have coming in through national insurance contributions and income tax to help the Treasury.
"That costs money in order to help people, but that is well worth it, and that's one thing that we should do. And of course, secondly, we should also be trying to tackle fraud and departmental error as well to make sure that the right money goes to the right people at the right time."
The Minister confirmed that the Executive have made their views on the issue clear to the UK Government and that he has discussed his concerns with the Secretary of State.
Speaking about the impact these changes will have on disabled people, he added: "I made it clear the need for us to continue the work on the disability strategy and the disability and work plan as well because I believe there are many disabled people who actually want to be in work, and what I mean whenever I say that we should break down barriers, is provide support to people to enable them to be in work, rather than to pull the rug out from underneath them, which is what I believe the UK Government is doing, and in doing so we'll absolutely need to increase costs... I also feel that this will have increased anxiety and, perhaps, in many cases, unnecessary anxiety because the government hasn't been clear as to exactly who this will impact and in what way it will impact.
"The fact that they weren't able to give us a total cost that was consistent in regards to the changes shows that they don't even know how this is going to affect people.
"We don't know the costs, and this is another one of the problems that we have with the way in which the Government have announced these changes. Whenever they were originally announced, we were told that it was going to save 5 billion pounds across the UK, which on a pro-rata basis would have been over 150 million pounds for Northern Ireland.
"That's now changed.The newest estimate that came back then was 3.4 billion pounds.So the fact that the Government was so far out in terms of how much this has cost, I believe, is an indication that we don't really know the impact that it's going to have. That means we don't know the impact that it is going to have on Northern Ireland, which makes me think that this has not been well thought through."
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