Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Final Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Eóin Tennyson on 20 February 2024.

MLA

Mr Eóin Tennyson

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

20 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget Bill: Final Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4381238

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I rise on behalf of the Alliance Party to support the Bill at Final Stage. As I spoke at some length at Second Stage, Mr Speaker, you will be relieved to know that I intend to keep my remarks relatively brief. As has been well rehearsed by many Members in the course of the Bill's passage, the circumstances in which we have considered the Bill have been far from ideal. Short of the Minister coming to the Chamber with a time machine, however, allowing the Bill to proceed provides the best and only means by which we can safeguard continued delivery of public services and make progress on public-sector pay negotiations for 2023-24. It is worth emphasising again that some of the Members who have decried the lack of time for scrutiny and exalted the role of MLAs are the same Members who prevented us from sitting in the Chamber and doing that job for the past two years and so bear the responsibility for walking us to the position in which we now find ourselves. I trust that those Members, having had an apparent epiphany about the importance of this place, will join my party's call for reform of the institutions to remove the ability of any single party to hold the process to ransom and to guarantee the political stability necessary to underpin good governance and robust scrutiny, recognising that we simply cannot have financial sustainability without that political sustainability.

Of course.

Absolutely. I concur with the Member that the First Minister and deputy First Minister in particular must be committed to seeing out the end of this term, in the interest of our public finances and public service delivery. My party would go further than that in that we believe that there needs to be a process between all the parties and the two Governments that are co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement in order to properly complete a root and branch review of the institutions. It has been suggested that the issue could be batted to the Assembly and Executive Review Committee, which is toothless and has not delivered, so none of us should be prepared to accept that answer from the First Minister or deputy First Minister. The issue is directly related to our finances, because many of the challenges that we now have in scrutiny and our ability to do long-term planning and public service transformation stem from the fact that we have stop-start devolution and hokey-cokey government. That needs to end, so I absolutely concur with the Member. Some have, rightly, criticised the financial package tabled by the UK Government, and, as I set out clearly in my remarks yesterday, there are indeed huge shortcomings in many areas. To be clear, they are shortcomings that the Alliance Party has highlighted at every opportunity, in the House and outside it, through negotiations with the Government, correspondence with the Government and in the media. However, we come to the table not just with a list of problems and unfunded asks, as others have done. We have set out clear solutions to the challenges that we face. We recognise that the additional £1 billion allocated by the Executive in 2023-24 provides significant relief for front-line services and provides space and time for further engagement with Treasury on the substantive issues. I trust that, as we now have an Executive in place, we will have a stronger collegiate position with which to progress in that regard. To be clear, the alternative strategy of "no, nay, never" would have left us with no Assembly, no Executive and no additional funding for public services and hard-working public servants. We must be clear that a very small minority of Members have either misunderstood or willfully sought to misrepresent the purpose and scope of the Bill. We must be absolutely clear that the Bill is not about setting out our future ambitions or strategic allocations for the time ahead; it is simply a Bill to give legislative cover so that Departments can continue to draw down cash, to deliver services without interruption and to make progress on public-sector pay in the short time that is left of this financial year. In closing, as the Bill completes its final legislative hurdle today, we must ensure, as others have said, that this is the last time any Budget Bill is passed in this fashion. As we look to 2024-25, the Budget for that year must progress at pace, and I concur with other Members' remarks in that regard. We must then swiftly move to multi-annual Budgets, and I hope that those Budget processes will be more coherent and will be aligned with the Programme for Government and the priorities of the Executive and the Assembly, as well as being informed by levels of engagement, consultation and scrutiny that the people whom we represent rightly deserve and expect.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:42 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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