Debate contribution: Executive Budget: Public Services
Debate contribution by Ms Michelle O'Neill on .
- MLA
- Ms Michelle O'Neill
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 21 September 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution (made as a minister)
- Business
- Oral Answers to Questions
- Heading
- Executive Budget: Public Services
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5742074
Read the official Assembly record
Text
The Executive are firmly committed to achieving a multi-year budget that is balanced and sustainable. That will help to provide the certainty required. We continue our negotiations with the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury in our efforts to finalise a multi-year Budget for 2026–2030. The current offer on the table still falls very much short of what is required. What we need is a fair and sustainable financial settlement that properly recognises local need, allows us to stabilise public finances and ensures that households and businesses are supported through the ongoing cost-of-living challenges. The Holtham review of our level of need concluded that we require a central relative funding of 128% compared with England. Analysis by the Fiscal Council also demonstrates that we are funded below need and significantly below the relative level of funding provided to Scotland and Wales. If we were funded above need in the same way as Wales, we would have in the region of an additional £1 billion to spend in each year of this spending review. If we were funded above need like Scotland, that could be around an additional £3 billion in each financial year. Those are the realities in the absence of an agreed Budget. We are continuing to press hard to get an agreed Budget but it must be the right Budget, it must be baselined, and it must tackle what we need to invest in public services to keep the lights on, transform public services and deal with all the other public sector issues that we have.
270 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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