Debate contribution: Education (Holiday Meal Payments) Bill: Consideration Stage
Debate contribution by Mr David Brooks on .
- MLA
- Mr David Brooks
- Party at the time
- Democratic Unionist Party
- Date
- 21 September 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Private Members' Business
- Heading
- Education (Holiday Meal Payments) Bill: Consideration Stage
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5742940
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Our position on the Bill is as it was previously. I spoke to the Chair about this earlier, and I can tell the House that we do not intend to divide on the amendments, but I will give voice to our concerns about the Bill in general. As I said earlier, nobody stands for office to see anyone, much less children, go hungry: quite the opposite. That is why we have the welfare system that we have in this country. It is part of my party's manifesto to support families who are struggling with the cost of living, and that is why we have had a focus on key issues such as childcare. No one in the Chamber should be indifferent to the circumstances of children from low-income households. I, like many others, serve and support people from working-class communities every day through the work of my constituency office. Good intentions, as we are seeing very often in the Chamber of late, do not on their own make for good legislation, however. I believe that this Bill gets the process fundamentally wrong. We know that it would create a statutory requirement —.
Yes.
The Member is well rehearsed on my position, following discussions at Committee. We do not support the use of the Department of Education to supply what we believe to be essentially a welfare payment. That is the gist of our position, and the Member is well aware of that. There is not opposition to the idea that families should have welfare payments where they are required in order to support them.
Yes, no problem.
I have only started my speech. I have said that we will not divide the House today on the amendments before us, and we will give due consideration to what may be tabled at Further Consideration Stage. I am outlining my party's position on the Bill, as you would expect me to. I understand that the general principles of the Bill are discussed at an earlier stage. I do not intend to speak for long, but I am putting on the record again my party's position on the Bill. I think that that is reasonable.
That is no problem.
It goes to the point that Mr O'Toole made in his intervention. We have an Education Department that already faces pressures in the hundreds of millions of pounds. The Members opposite will be asking the Minister to meet demands on teachers' pay and workload; improving quality and capacity within SEN services; bringing a crumbling school estate back up to standard; and many more issues for which huge and expensive commitments are required. We all know — perhaps no one more than the party that holds the Finance portfolio — of the financial pressures that face public services. The Finance Minister has described the public finances as "extremely constrained". The Executive have been dealing with significant pressures on departmental budgets. Last week, we heard that only a fraction of the Barnett consequential for uplifts for SEN education on the mainland had been distributed to the Department of Education. There are significant pressures on the Department. I am not going to go through my whole speech, but —.
Yes.
All those things have one thing in common: they are directly relevant to the education of the children in our education system. This is not; this is a holiday payment.
Yes, I am happy to.
568 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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