Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Miss Nuala McAllister on 19 February 2024.

MLA

Miss Nuala McAllister

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

19 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4223506

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. This is the first time that I have been in the Chamber when you have been in the Chair, so I congratulate you on taking your role. I will try to keep my remarks short, but there are a number of areas on which I want to speak in particular as health spokesperson for Alliance and as a member of the Policing Board, as well as in my capacity as an Alliance MLA. I recognise that today's debate is not a vision for the future, and we must be clear on that when we make our representations to the public. None of us in the Chamber would want to be here today if this were the vision for the future, but, unfortunately, after more than a decade of Tory austerity, we are where we are and must deal with the public finances as they stand. They were obviously not helped by two years of the Assembly's not sitting. Out of the previous seven years, we have had too many years where we have not been able to make decisions for the benefit of all of the people of Northern Ireland. However, moving forward, I look forward to the Minister highlighting the case with the Treasury and with our Departments for how we can realise that vision for the benefit of everyone in Northern Ireland. I want to move on to talk about how we landed in this position. Over the past two years, we have placed our permanent secretaries and civil servants in untenable positions, where they have had to take decisions that they, frankly, should not have taken. Unfortunately, we landed in a place where it seemed that everything that was not placed on a statutory footing was up for the chop. A number of MLAs have spoken about Happy Healthy Minds and about holiday hunger. We also had the Engage programme. A number of programmes in the Executive Office could not be fulfilled, not just because of the lack of an Assembly but because of the funding allocations. When we have cut funds to non-statutory obligations, we have essentially shifted the burden. In the Chamber last week, I spoke on the issue of mental health in particular. When we cut the community and voluntary sector, the burden is placed back on the statutory sector.

As an example, I will talk about holiday hunger. The two-child cap on households in Northern Ireland has plunged so many families into poverty. In North Belfast, my constituency, over 1,000 households are affected by the cap. So many of those families relied on the holiday hunger programme in order to feed their children. We are talking about feeding children in 2024. Now that they do not have that safety net, those families have had to rely on other services in our community. When we did not see further expansion of multidisciplinary teams or Sure Start, more and more families were put on waiting lists and so turned to other statutory and community organisations. Again, it is not just about cutting services but about shifting the burden elsewhere. When we do not have mitigations in place, we see waiting lists increase across health and education, more families in distress and more pressures on our statutory services. Despite having the youngest population, Northern Ireland spends more per head on health and social care than anywhere else in the UK, yet our system is crumbling. It is not getting any better. It is overly bureaucratic and delivers by far the worst outcomes for waiting times, for diagnosis as well as for treatment. We want to ensure that what we spend is not spent on a failing system but on a system that is transformed, but we cannot achieve that transformation without ensuring that we have sustainability in the immediate future. That is why we need to ensure that, moving forward, our health service is put front and centre of that transformation. We need to ensure that we can rely on our workers by not driving them out of jobs, by paying them correctly and by valuing the work that they do in the service by ensuring that there is adequate provision in each of our disciplines. Last month, I stood on the picket lines with many of our healthcare workers, education workers and Fire and Rescue Service workers. Those people chose their vocation because it is something that they are passionate about. If we want to ensure that people who are passionate about their role stay in that role, we need to pay them correctly. I understand and can see that we cannot go entirely in the direction in which every single worker and union wants us to today, but, by ensuring that we progress this Bill and outline our vision for the future, we can lay down the right marker to be on that forward trajectory. It is not just me, as Alliance spokesperson, or Members right across the Chamber who speak about the capacity of the health sector and the pressures that it is facing. That is coming from the sector itself. Many organisations out there speak directly to us about what they want to see when it comes to our health service's finances. The Royal College of Surgeons has said time and again, "We need three-year budgets. Recurrent funding is critical. We need £200 million every year for five years if we are to cut long waiting lists for good". The British Medical Association (BMA) has said, "We are frustrated by the slow pace of transformation and reform of health and social care in Northern Ireland. Plans have been made, but implementation has not followed". Cancer Research UK, while waiting for the full funding and implementation of the cancer strategy, has said that it has been disheartened, and much more, for so many people affected by cancer that, two years on, so little has been progressed. When we speak today in the Chamber, it is not just about us as MLAs representing our constituencies. We are representing the entirety of Northern Ireland and the many allied health professionals and organisations that do their work, day in, day out, and know just what is right for the health service. I will now speak a little bit about the justice budget. In the past 12 years, the health budget has grown by 70% and the education budget by 45%, yet the justice budget has seen just an increase of a little over 3%. The policing budget takes up 70% of the justice budget, but it is just one element of the criminal justice system. If we are to have a fair and expeditious justice system, we need to fund it in its entirety. Mr Deputy Speaker, you and I know from sitting on the Policing Board that there are inescapable pressures when funding the justice system, but if we are to see a true and fair allocation of the entirety of the justice budget, we need to see that happen across the board.

We want to ensure that those facing the front-line pressures, whether in justice, health or education, are not the first people to be withdrawn across Northern Ireland. We can do that only if we have a Budget that is a vision for the entirety of Northern Ireland. As I said when I made my first remarks, we are not where we wanted to be, but, unfortunately, given where we have landed, we need to ensure that we have a safety net for the Departments moving towards the end of the financial year. For that reason, we support the Budget Bill today, but we look forward to working with the Minister of Finance to ensure that we can realise the potential for the entirety of Northern Ireland moving forward.

1,300 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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