Debate contribution: Regional Balance Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Ms Kate Nicholl on 8 September 2026.

MLA: Ms Kate Nicholl
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 5674496

Text

Like others, I thank Sinéad for introducing the Bill. She is such a wonderful champion of regional balance. Any time the term is mentioned at the Economy Committee, everyone instantly looks at her. I am delighted that the Bill has got to this stage. You deserve it. You are a wonderful champion of your constituency on the issue, and I really look forward to it coming to Committee so that we can work on it further together. I look forward to getting into the detail, and a lot has already been discussed that we will be able to discuss more. Let no one from outside Belfast jump to their feet until I have finished what I am saying, but, as a champion of Belfast, I will always stress that Belfast is a regional driver for Northern Ireland. It competes with cities on the rest of the island and with big cities in the UK and Europe for investment and opportunities, but it should not be the only economic driver in the region. I am married to a Fermanagh man, and I am painfully aware that regional balance is about people. It is about not having to move away from your home area to get a good education, a good job and meaningful opportunities to build a good life. It is about fairness, investment and support for all people across Northern Ireland. I always joke that I am in politics because I do not want my kids to move to Australia, but there is something so meaningful in that. So many families are torn apart and live long distances apart, often not through choice but out of necessity. Regional balance comes back to that. It comes back to who we are as people. It is about social justice, as my colleague said, and it is right that we start with the why. I am chair of the all-party group on policy and public data, which is, I know, the most boring-sounding all-party group in the Assembly, but it is the most interesting. As Sinéad said, "the data tells the story". It is so crucial to everything. It is not just about getting a better understanding of where we are now; it is about what it will look like in the future, so I am delighted that that is at the core of this. The all-party group talks a lot about data linkage. It comes up in every policy discussion. Each Department is a separate legal entity, and that can be difficult when you are trying to get information sets shared across Departments.
We need to pay more attention to that. My colleague Ciara Ferguson is in the Chamber, and we both talk a lot about it. We are so data-rich in Northern Ireland. Information is captured from the minute we are born until the minute we die. There are huge datasets, and, if we were able to link up and use full population datasets, we would be able to solve so many of the biggest issues that we face as a society. That is one thing that we need to look at, because the idea of regional balance in the Bill is no different. Data illustrates the current problems and will be used to assess the effectiveness of the Bill, if it passes, as, I hope, it will. We do not need to get into this now, but I will give Members some insight into what I will look at in Committee. What datasets do we really need, and which will be most important to assess the outworkings and implementation of the Bill? There are some key points in clause 7, but are there any other datasets that would be useful? Can we bring together population-level datasets to fully understand the issues, and is there anything else that we could look at? The Administrative Data Research Centre Northern Ireland (ADRC NI) team, which is based at Queen's University Belfast, provides secretariat support to the all-party group. It is a team of responsible data scientists. It has done really important work to link datasets. It would be interesting to speak to those people about what will make it richer. The data linkage point is fundamental to how we can understand reality in a vibrant manner and have fuller links between Departments. In particular, health data and other datasets held by Departments and public bodies would give us a much better sense of the regional imbalance and provide a stronger assessment of outcomes. I will stay with data but shift my emphasis a bit.
Yes, absolutely.

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

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