Debate contribution: Budget 2024-25
Debate contribution by Ms Paula Bradshaw on .
- MLA
- Ms Paula Bradshaw
- Party at the time
- Alliance Party
- Date
- 28 May 2024
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Executive Committee Business
- Heading
- Budget 2024-25
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 4492289
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I totally agree — this is the first opportunity that the Department has taken to offer us that briefing — so thank you for that. I will make my remarks on the Executive Office budget. In her foreword to the Budget document, the Finance Minister says that demands on the Budget amount to £1·50 for every £1 that she has available to spend. It should be emphasised that my colleagues and I fully support her case for an improved package from the UK Treasury. I would like to correct the record. I am sure that the DUP Member for South Down did not mean to mislead the House when she said that parties other than her own championed and cheered on the financial package. My party leader, Naomi Long, said on 11 December:
"It was important to see key issues Alliance has consistently raised form part of the paper we were all provided with today ... That includes the need for a fiscal floor for funding Northern Ireland, to ensure we are funded in line with need, a separate stabilisation fund to undo some of the harm created by cuts and to tackle backlogs, and also a transformation fund to allow us to improve public services. Those three elements form part of the offer today, but we now need to look at the amount allocated to each and where from, as the current proposal just won't create financial sustainability."
That is on the website, if anybody would like to read it. Nevertheless, it should also be emphasised that we will always have more demands on the public purse than it can meet out of revenue raised. As one Chancellor put it, the queue of people telling you what they can spend money on will always be longer than the queue telling you what you should cut spending on. That brings us to the need to cut waste and to prioritise. The problem is that it is difficult to prioritise if we do not have a Programme for Government. We should also better define what "inescapable pressures" are. Today, we are essentially budgeting in the dark and setting spending limits assuming that we will want to do roughly the same as we did last year. That is not the route to efficient budgeting, nor is it the route to delivering real change and reform for the public. The Executive Office's record after 100 days of restored devolution was not good. I will not repeat the details, but we have seen a failure to appoint an array of commissioners and even the Executive Office's own permanent secretary. We have not seen any meaningful movement on key issues such as a memorial to victims and survivors of the historical institutional abuse of children. We have not seen any movement at all on issues such as the replacement of the international relations strategy, the current version of which dates from pre Brexit. The Executive Office also oversees a Strategic Investment Board that is under review but that, in the meantime, continues to support an educational campus that the independent review of education warned clearly against building and for which the budget is not yet secure. The Executive Office did that while supposedly supporting a stadium that the Minister refuses to put out to tender. It also supports, at considerable cost, a Maze/Long Kesh Development Corporation that cannot demonstrate any meaningful outcomes over the past few years. That sort of thing matters. For example, without an up-to-date international relations strategy, how are we to define the purpose of the Northern Ireland Bureau in Beijing? What are we expecting it to deliver, and how do we assess its performance? Speaking of budgeting in the dark, the truth is that we —.
OK. I will leave it there. I had plenty more to say. Thank you.
639 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Assessment
Jev’s structured answers met the documented threshold for “not flagged”.
- Overall probability that the activity is being used to promote, exploit or escalate an identity-based controversy: 0.07 (flagging needs at least 0.70; at or below 0.30 is not flagged).
- None of the five culture-war criteria was met (each was below 0.60).
- Assessed as legitimate policy scrutiny (0.91).
- No identity-based framing was identified (0.98).
- Subject area: Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism.
- The overall probability was at or below the not-flagging threshold.
This is an AI-generated assessment of the text, made against published criteria. It is not a finding of fact about the MLA or their intentions. The Assembly record itself is the fact.
Jev’s structured answers
| Question | Probability | Met? |
|---|---|---|
| Identity framing | 0.04 | No |
| Sectarian or communal antagonism | 0.02 | No |
| Cultural grievance politics | 0.04 | No |
| Dog-whistle messaging | 0.05 | No |
| Controversy escalation | 0.09 | No |
| Legitimate policy scrutiny | 0.91 | Yes |
| Overall judgement | 0.07 | At or below not-flagging threshold |
| Option | Probability |
|---|---|
| No identity-based framing (chosen) | 0.98 |
| Reports or questions it | 0.02 |
| Criticises or condemns it | 0.00 |
| Adopts it | 0.00 |
| Subject | Probability |
|---|---|
| Legacy of the Troubles, victims and paramilitarism | 0.79 |
| No identity-related subject | 0.14 |
| Flags, emblems, symbols, names and memorials | 0.04 |
| Constitutional question, Brexit, the Windsor Framework and sovereignty | 0.03 |
| Parades, bonfires and commemorations | 0.00 |
Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:32 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.
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