Debate contribution: Budget 2024-25

Debate contribution by Mrs Diane Dodds on 28 May 2024.

MLA

Mrs Diane Dodds

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

28 May 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget 2024-25

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4492632

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Having listened to the debate, I think that all of us in the Chamber, particularly those on the Health Committee, would like to see a slightly easier Budget for all Departments but particularly for Health. We are aware of and acknowledge the people who are on long waiting lists and the number of people who require urgent treatment. In reality, however, we also know that the cake is only so large. We have other Departments with pressing priorities. While it is a challenging Budget for every Department, it is beyond dispute that Health gets over 51% of the total Budget. The Minister of Health stated, in correspondence to the Committee, that he wanted an extra £1 billion but would settle for £800 million. Incidentally, the Committee took significant exception to some of the Minister's correspondence to the Committee being briefed to the media before it was released to the Committee. I understand that only an additional £958 million was available, so we were never going to reach £1 billion additional for Health in one year. Did the Minister seriously think that he would get £800 million out of £958 million, with all the pressures that there are in education, the economy, infrastructure and other sectors? It is difficult for the Minister to claim that others have not prioritised Health when he received the majority of the additional funding available and when Health obtains a majority of every pound allocated by the Executive. Indeed, the director of public spending at the Department of Finance said:

"As a result of the ongoing prioritisation of Health, the allocation of a further £472 million in this Budget will see the Department of Health's baseline funding increase by almost £2 billion since ... 2020."

That inevitably brings us to two significant questions: where will the additional money come from, and how can the Minister and, indeed, his party, say that he will not vote for the Budget, will resign and will install a colleague who will then have to implement the Budget? These are strange times. The previous Member to speak might have been accurate in her diagnosis of the problem. Some of the material from the Department of Health has been a little disingenuous, seeking to compare the starting position for 2024-25 with the overall closing position for the previous year. The Minister and his officials are well aware that significant allocations will be made over the year in monitoring rounds; indeed, the Minister's proposed amendment seems to satisfy that assumption. In his letter to the Health Committee yesterday, the Minister pointed to various elements of health delivery that may be impacted on by the Budget, but he did not prioritise any of them, and the Health Committee has not yet seen the detailed spending plans for Health. The Minister indicated that £135 million could make a real difference to waiting lists, but he can invest that sum if he chooses, by prioritising it over other spend in his Department from his multi-billion-pound annual allocation.

I will.

I certainly agree with the Member. One of the things that we have managed to avoid in the House, particularly during the period of COVID, has been playing politics with health. We are in a place that is deeply regrettable, and we need to see detailed plans on how the significant budget will be spent. On top of that, Ministers and other Assembly Members struggle with the fact that the Health Department assumes that it will be given an automatic increase year-on-year-on-year. We need to deal with that, and, on the Member's point, we need to actually get to the stage where we see significant transformation in health. For significant transformation to occur, there will have to be a re-prioritisation of how we deliver health, so we need to see the Minister's plan. In the House on 15 April, I asked the Minister when he would publish his plan for the reorganisation of hospitals and services. He replied that he would bring it forward:

"within the next couple of weeks." — [Official Report (Hansard), 15 April 2024, p38, col 2].

That was six weeks ago, and we still have no plan. The multidisciplinary primary care teams, including social workers, physiotherapists and mental health practitioners, are key to the transformation and are part of the Bengoa Delivering Together programme. Initial funding for those teams came from the DUP confidence-and-supply agreement, and they were to be rolled out Province-wide. It is hard to fathom that something so fundamental to transformation has been allowed to wither on the vine, with all the difficulties that that contributes to general practice. Again, that is an investment that should have been prioritised and elevated above other projects or schemes that are not fundamental to transformation. From talking to GPs and their representatives, one of the things that we absolutely understand is that, if we are not going to transform primary care —

— we will still have difficulties in secondary care.

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

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:35 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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