Debate contribution: Job Creation: Ambitious Targets

Debate contribution by Mr David Honeyford on 19 March 2024.

MLA

Mr David Honeyford

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

19 March 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Job Creation: Ambitious Targets

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4279733

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I feel unwell, but I am trying to be positive about this. To be honest, when I read the motion, out of frustration I did not know where to start. We will support it — anybody would support it. I do not think that any of us would disagree with anything in a motion that calls for more jobs. However, the focus should be on how we deliver, rather than on a randomly plucked figure. The motion leaves us none the wiser. It has to be about delivery, not words. I will start by getting the elephant out of the room. The line:

"addressing the needs of businesses and employers",

is interesting coming from the party that campaigned and voted for Brexit, and therefore for trade friction, and that took the huff for two years, pulling the Assembly down and leaving our business community to get on with it and sort out issues for themselves. Now, when we have an election coming up, there is a road to Damascus conversion. I said that I was not sure where to start, but I will start by saying that business need us to start by reforming the Assembly, so that no single party can collapse this place and we guarantee stability for our business community. It is the business community that creates the jobs; it ain't us. That is the point that is missing in this. Any business will tell you that the starting point is to give inward investment the security of stability to invest. Stability is the starting point. We all want 5,000 new jobs. Pluck a figure — why not make it 10,000? We absolutely all want our economy to grow, but surely we should agree the changes that are needed to grow our economy and then measure the outcomes of those. This is like giving a football team that is down the divisions a target of winning the Premier League without giving them any help, any resources or anything else to change. You just give them a target of winning the Premier League. It is completely unrealistic unless you make the changes that are needed. I hope we can all stand and support the policy changes that will be needed for our business communities to flourish. I hope that the Minister will bring those policy changes forward quickly, because we have a limited window of opportunity. It needs to happen now. Our job here is to set the conditions to allow it to happen. The past 15 years have been talked about as some sort of romantic notion. Recent reports have said that we have actually been below the UK average over the past 15 years. The UK is hardly the benchmark that we should base our growth ambitions on. The potential that we have here needs a holistic approach that addresses every element of our economy. Part of that may be, as my colleague Sorcha said, about higher education. All of this is interconnected. What is really important is that those changes are not held back and restricted by constitutional ideologies. We need to get serious, leave our political ideology at the door and start to create the conditions that our business community need. If we do not, we create barriers before we even start. If we continue doing what we have been doing, this will be nothing more than a pipe dream. It is a road, and our business community needs the Chamber to build it. We need to be in one lane, providing public services, and stay out of the way of the rest to allow our business community to flourish. We need major change. Alliance wants to see that change and to look at where we can work in partnership across this island and within these islands. I ask the Minister what actions have been taken to deliver essential collaboration between IDA Ireland and Invest NI, because those actions are needed right now. We need financial investment into skills and apprenticeships and to create more opportunities, including in technical universities in our FE sector. I have raised that before. What is the Minister doing to develop that sector? Those are questions that we need answered and the things that we need to discuss. A great start would be to value our FE staff and enhance their pay and conditions.

I absolutely agree. You can only start from where you are. The fact of where we are is that we are one of the poorest regions of Europe. We need to work and grow from that point. That is where we are, and that is what we need to do. I totally agree. You have to be realistic about your starting point and your end goal. How does business create 5,000 new jobs without the financial support to grow and without access to bank funding and debt markets so that businesses can actually invest in themselves? How does business create 5,000 new jobs if our current planning system, which, at best, can be described as seriously lacking in delivery, is still in place? How does business create new tourism jobs when the electronic travel authorisation has been enforced by GB? Although we have, for example, a Wild Atlantic Way product across the rest of the island, it —

— stops at the border. Alliance will always be up for creating the conditions for our economy to grow, and our vision is based on evidence for growth. We support the motion, but we need to get real.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:53 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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