Debate contribution: Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Spring Supplementary Estimates 2023-24 and Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Estimates: Vote On Account 2024-25

Debate contribution by Ms Kellie Armstrong on 9 April 2024.

MLA

Ms Kellie Armstrong

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

9 April 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Spring Supplementary Estimates 2023-24 and Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Estimates: Vote On Account 2024-25

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4482187

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Minister, this is another long one for you today. Thank you very much for sticking with us; there are a lot of us contributing today. We are here to vote on the spring Supplementary Estimates, and I appreciate that it is a technical matter that completes the financial year that has just gone past. We should also look forward to when we will consider the Vote on Account that enables the Executive to spend money to keep this place afloat until such time as a Budget for 2024-25 is created.

This is the perfect opportunity to discuss the impacts of the 2023-24 Budget, as so many who have spoken before me today have done. As communities spokesperson for the Alliance Party, I get to see how difficult the lack of a progressive Budget is for the people who live in Northern Ireland. The Department for Communities recently reissued its 'Northern Ireland Poverty and Income Inequality Report, 2022/23'. It confirms that we have more children and more working-age adults living in absolute poverty. I expect that, when the updated report is issued for 2023-24, the numbers of people living in poverty will increase again, and that is shameful. In response, an emerging group of 14 organisations called Cost of Living 24 that includes Inspire Wellbeing, Housing Rights, South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (STEP), Advice NI, Carers NI and the Healthy Living Centre Alliance will launch an online, updated cost-of-living response based on the Inspire Wellbeing website that was launched during COVID. Cost of Living 24, on the Community Wellbeing NI website, will be aimed at people accessing support for the first time, which is a trend that we see across our food banks in Northern Ireland. It is not just people on benefits but people who are working who can no longer afford to heat their home and eat. The website will offer advice on money and debt, food and energy costs, benefits and grants, and housing, including what help may be available for people who are in rent or mortgage arrears. It will offer support for people with disabilities, carers, older persons and those with pet expenses and provide details of local advice centres across Northern Ireland. The reason that the group has stepped up is that the Trussell Trust reported in February 2024 — this is looking back at the financial year that we have just come through — that 55% of people receiving universal credit in Northern Ireland ran out of food in January 2024 and could not afford more. Some 14,000 people claiming universal credit in Northern Ireland have needed to use a food bank in the past month. More than half of the people claiming universal credit in Northern Ireland — 62% — are either behind on bills and credit commitments or find it a constant struggle to keep themselves warm. Four in 10 people — 62,000 people claiming universal credit — have fallen into debt because they could not keep up with essential bills. The 2023-24 Budget was, as we know, set by the Secretary of State because there was no Executive and no Assembly. It was only when this place was finally able to get back to work that moneys from the agreement could be released to take some pressure off the people who live in poverty, people whom we are supposed to help. Additional money was able to be spent on discretionary support, which is a lifeline to the people whom the Trussell Trust talked about. In the past year, we did not have enough money to build enough homes. We have the worst waiting lists for social housing and the highest ever number of people who are homeless. Our partners in the community and voluntary sector, on whom we depend to deliver so many social interventions, including supporting people and access to employment and training for those who are furthest from employment, need the financial confidence of multi-year Budgets. Having worked for many years in that sector prior to becoming an MLA, I am fully aware of the pressures placed on those organisations. Their staff face the constant threat of redundancy; in some cases, it is an annual threat. The freeze on Northern Ireland Civil Service recruitment means that the Department for Communities is under significant pressure to deliver large programmes of work, including the move to universal credit. Looking forward, we need to change how this place works. We need a Programme for Government that is underpinned by previously agreed strategies such as the anti-poverty strategy, which should include targeted actions to ensure that no child here lives in poverty. Social strategies, including the disability strategy, the racial equality strategy and the investment strategy, are all listed as key supporting strategies, and we have already agreed them in the House. We also need to improve our timing to ensure that the Budget works to deliver the Programme for Government. That is not what, I suspect, will be the case in 2024-25, where the Budget will determine and limit actions. I therefore challenge the Minister of Finance to confirm how she will ensure that such a large Vote on Account is not needed again in this mandate. I ask her to give a commitment to the House that the 2024-25 Budget will be the last Budget in this mandate that is brought to the House before a Programme for Government is decided. As I said, we need to look forward and change how this place works. We need to commit to upholding a working Government to ensure that we never again leave people in Northern Ireland to suffer under a Budget introduced by a Secretary of State. We can do that through reform, whereby every Member in the Assembly has an equal vote and vetoes are no longer the shadow hanging over this place or the people whom we are supposed to support. Minister, I hope that you can give me that commitment today.

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

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:57 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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