Debate contribution: Regional Balance Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 8 September 2026.

MLA: Mr David Honeyford
Party at the time: Alliance Party
Date: 8 September 2026
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Regional Balance Bill: Second Stage
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5674392

Text

I am not here to make DUP or Sinn Féin speeches. I am here to try to get better for ordinary people, and that is at the heart of what Sinéad is trying to do. You introduced a thought into my head about manufacturing. Central government in the South implemented a strategy to grow manufacturing. The outworking of that has been that 85% of those jobs are not in Dublin, so it created regional balance by introducing a strategy that delivered outcomes, albeit the infrastructure and skills have to be in those areas. We have a Bill for sustainable regional economies, which brings me to what is probably the most important issue, namely infrastructure. We cannot talk seriously about regional economic balance without talking about infrastructure and the lack of it. We can identify an area and produce strategies and job targets, and we can give Invest NI targets and tell it what we want it to achieve and promote all day long. However, if a business cannot get people there, if there is no road or rail link to transport its goods away, if it cannot get a waste water connection or connected to the grid, if it faces years in planning, cannot recruit people from the area with the right skills or does not have connectivity, the investment is simply going to go elsewhere. It has nothing to do with whether we give Invest NI a target. Rather, it is the fact that we have not delivered the infrastructure to enable investment to happen. The Government's job should not be to force businesses to invest where we want them to invest when it is not commercially viable for them. Our job is to make more places work commercially. Our role is to create the platform for businesses to be able to come in and operate and grow. That is a really important distinction: we are not creating bureaucracy for the sake of it but creating the platform on which people can prosper and growth can happen. That needs to be central to the operation of the Bill. The definition of "regional disparity" in clause 7 includes:
"the regional distribution of public capital expenditure;"
That is welcome, but it needs to go further as the Bill progresses, because the framework should identify the specific infrastructure constraints that are preventing economic and social development in each region, and there then needs to be an action plan to remove those constraints. We do not need more reports or strategies, we need delivery plans to push out that infrastructure so that people can see the benefit. I have a slight concern that we are creating reporting architecture. For example, clause 3 requires the Department to compile —
Yes, I am happy to.

460 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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